The Wheel of Conflict: How to Handle Conflict at Work
These are the five areas of conflict and how to solve each one. Every manager has been there. Two people on the same team who mostly get along, but the moment a disagreement surfaces, they are the first to clash. The tension spreads. Communication breaks down. The rest of the team feels it. And you are left trying to figure out where to even begin.
The problem with most approaches to workplace conflict is that they treat the symptom instead of the cause. Two people are butting heads, so you sit them down, remind them to be professional, and hope it does not happen again. It always happens again. Because the underlying cause was never identified or addressed.
The Wheel of Conflict, developed by conflict resolution expert Christopher Moore, gives you a framework for doing exactly that. Instead of reacting to conflict as a single undifferentiated problem, it breaks conflict down into five distinct root causes. Once you know which cause is driving a specific conflict, you know what kind of intervention will actually work rather than which one feels right in the moment.
This article explains every component of the Wheel of Conflict, applies it to a real workplace scenario, and gives you practical steps for resolving each type of conflict before it gets out of hand.
What Is the Wheel of Conflict?
The Wheel of Conflict is a conflict analysis framework created by Christopher Moore, a leading expert in mediation and negotiation. It proposes that every conflict, regardless of how complicated it looks on the surface, is driven by one or more of five underlying causes: data, interests, structure, values, and relationships.
Moore visualized these five causes as equal sections of a wheel, each representing a distinct source of conflict that requires a different resolution approach. The framework is widely used in mediation, organizational psychology, and leadership development because it moves conflict resolution from instinct and reaction to structured diagnosis and targeted intervention.
The core insight of the Wheel of Conflict is that not all conflicts are the same. A conflict driven by a values difference requires a completely different response than one driven by a data gap or a structural power imbalance. Applying the wrong intervention to the wrong type of conflict does not just fail to resolve the problem. It often makes it worse by addressing something the other party does not see as the real issue.
For managers and leaders, the Wheel of Conflict is most valuable as a diagnostic tool. Before you intervene in a conflict between team members, identify which of the five causes is most active. That identification determines everything that follows.
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The Workplace Conflict Scenario
To make the Wheel of Conflict concrete rather than theoretical, we will apply it throughout this article to a real and recognizable workplace situation.
A manager and a senior employee are in conflict over an upcoming project. The employee has significantly more experience with this type of project than her manager and believes the team is ready to proceed. The manager wants more research time before starting and is pushing back on the timeline.
From the employee's perspective, her manager's hesitation feels like a lack of confidence in her abilities. She has done this a hundred times. His requests for more preparation feel like criticism of her competence rather than legitimate strategic caution. She also feels he holds her to a higher standard than other team members, which she experiences as unfair. When these tensions rise she becomes withdrawn and avoidant in her communication with him.
From the manager's perspective, he thinks she does excellent work. He put her on this project specifically because he trusts her. He has a promotion riding on its success, which is driving his desire for more thorough preparation. He does not understand why she sometimes seems standoffish or difficult. He perceives her as having an attitude without understanding why.
The result is poor communication, team tension, and a communication breakdown that is affecting not just their working relationship but the performance and morale of everyone around them.
This scenario contains elements of all five sources of conflict from the Wheel of Conflict. Let us work through each one.
The Five Sources of Conflict: The Wheel Explained
1. Data Conflicts
What a data conflict is:
A data conflict occurs when two parties are working from different information, incomplete information, or the same information interpreted in completely different ways. It is one of the most common and most easily resolvable types of conflict because it does not involve deeply held values or emotional wounds. It is simply a gap in shared understanding of the facts.
Data conflicts arise when one person believes they have all the relevant information and the other believes important information is missing. They arise when two people look at the same data and draw different conclusions about what it means. They arise from rumors, misinformation, and secondhand accounts that one party treats as fact. And they arise when parties disagree about how relevant or reliable specific information is for the decision at hand.
In organizations, data conflicts are particularly common in fast-moving environments where information is not consistently shared across team members, where data is siloed in different departments or systems, or where there is no agreed upon process for how decisions get made and what information is required to make them.
How data conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager believes more research is needed before proceeding. The employee believes all the necessary information is already in hand. They are not disagreeing about a value or a relationship. They are disagreeing about what they know and what they need to know. This is a data conflict.
The complicating factor is that neither party has explicitly laid out what information they have versus what they believe is missing. The employee assumes the manager's hesitation is about her ability rather than about an information gap. The manager has not articulated clearly what specific research he believes is missing and why it matters to the project's success. In the absence of explicit communication about the data, both parties are filling the gap with assumptions that are driving the conflict further.
How to resolve a data conflict:
The intervention for a data conflict is structured information sharing rather than emotional mediation. Bring both parties together specifically to answer two questions: what information do we currently have, and what information do we believe we still need before proceeding?
Create a shared document or whiteboard that lists the available data on one side and the open questions on the other. Assign specific people to find answers to specific open questions and set a deadline for when that information will be available. This transforms a vague disagreement about readiness into a concrete and trackable process.
In the manager and employee scenario, this conversation might reveal that the manager's concern is much narrower than the employee assumed. Perhaps he is specifically worried about one regulatory requirement or one competitor's recent move that he wants to understand better before committing. If the employee knew that, she might readily agree that spending two days researching that specific question is worth doing. The conflict evaporates not because feelings changed but because information was shared.
Establish a team norm for how information gets gathered and shared before major decisions. When everyone operates from a shared information standard, data conflicts become less frequent because the expectation of what constitutes sufficient information is explicit rather than assumed.
2. Interest Conflicts
What an interest conflict is:
An interest conflict occurs when two parties have different underlying motivations, needs, or goals that pull them in different directions on a specific issue. It is important to distinguish between positions and interests because they are not the same thing.
A position is what someone says they want. An interest is why they want it. Two people can hold opposite positions while actually sharing the same underlying interest, which is what makes interest conflicts resolvable when they are properly diagnosed. Conversely, two people can appear to agree on a position while having very different interests driving them, which is what makes some apparently resolved conflicts reappear.
Interest conflicts are often driven by competition, either for resources, recognition, authority, or outcomes. They frequently involve a mix of substantive interests, which are the concrete things each party needs from the situation, and psychological interests, which are the less tangible needs around respect, recognition, fairness, and autonomy.
How interest conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager's stated position is that the team needs more research time. His underlying interest, which he has not disclosed to the employee, is that this project is directly tied to his potential promotion. His interest is not just a successful project. It is an exceptionally well-prepared and low-risk project that demonstrates his leadership capability to whoever is evaluating him for promotion.
The employee's stated position is that the team is ready to proceed. Her underlying interest is in demonstrating her competence and experience, completing the project successfully on the timeline she is confident in, and being trusted to make the calls that fall within her area of expertise.
These interests are not inherently incompatible. Both parties want the project to succeed. But because neither has disclosed their underlying interests to the other, they are negotiating over positions that feel opposed rather than over interests that might be aligned.
How to resolve an interest conflict:
The intervention for an interest conflict is interest disclosure, which sounds simple but requires an environment of psychological safety to work. Encourage both parties to share not just what they want but why they want it. What is at stake for each of them? What do they need from this situation beyond the surface level outcome?
In the scenario, if the employee understood that the manager's request for more research time was not about her competence but about the particular stakes he has riding on this project, her response might change completely. She might even become an ally in making sure the preparation is thorough rather than an opponent of the additional time.
A useful facilitation question for interest conflicts is: if we could design an outcome that works for both of us, what would it need to include? This moves the conversation from competing positions to collaborative problem solving. Each party shares what they need the outcome to provide, and the group works to design something that satisfies both sets of needs rather than picking a winner and a loser.
Interest mapping is a practical tool for this process. Before the mediation conversation, have each party independently write down their top three interests in the situation, the reasons behind their stated position. Share these maps in the conversation and look for overlap and compatibility. More often than not, the interests are more aligned than the positions suggest.
3. Structural Conflicts
What a structural conflict is:
A structural conflict is caused by the conditions in which people are working rather than by anything either party has done or believes. It encompasses power imbalances, resource constraints, time pressure, geographic separation, unclear roles and responsibilities, and organizational policies that create friction between people who might otherwise work together effectively.
Structural conflicts are particularly insidious because they feel personal even though they are systemic. When one person has authority over another, decisions that are simply the exercise of that authority can feel like personal attacks or expressions of distrust to the person on the receiving end. When resources are scarce, competition for them feels like a character conflict when it is actually a structural one.
Common structural sources of conflict in organizations include unclear decision-making authority that leaves people uncertain about who has the final say on a given matter, performance evaluation systems that pit team members against each other rather than aligning them toward shared goals, workload imbalances that create resentment between people who feel they are carrying more than their share, and reporting structures that require cross-functional collaboration without giving either party the authority to make it happen.
How structural conflict appears in the scenario:
The power imbalance between the manager and employee is a structural element of their conflict. The employee has more experience with this type of project than her manager. She is, in a practical sense, more qualified to make certain calls about project readiness. But he has the formal authority that comes with his management position. This gap between practical expertise and formal authority creates structural tension that is present in every interaction they have, not just this specific disagreement.
The timeline itself is a structural element. If the employee is worried about having enough time to complete the project successfully and the manager is pushing for more upfront research, they have a real resource conflict around time that needs to be explicitly addressed rather than talked around. Adding research time at the front end reduces execution time at the back end, and that tradeoff has real consequences that should be laid out explicitly.
How to resolve a structural conflict:
Structural conflicts require structural solutions, which means adjusting the conditions rather than changing the people or their attitudes. Attitude adjustment without structural change produces temporary improvement followed by the same conflict recurring under slightly different circumstances.
For power imbalance conflicts, clarify decision-making authority explicitly. Which decisions are the manager's to make? Which are the employee's to make given her expertise? Are there categories of decisions that should be made jointly? Making this explicit removes the ambiguity that causes both parties to feel the other is overstepping.
For the timeline conflict, create a shared project plan with major milestones mapped out. Identify which milestones are flexible and which are fixed. Look at the research phase and the execution phase together and make explicit what the tradeoff is between more preparation time and less execution time. Once the tradeoff is visible, both parties can make an informed decision about where to draw the line rather than arguing from their respective gut feelings about what the timeline should be.
For ongoing structural issues around the power imbalance between management experience and functional expertise, consider creating explicit mechanisms for the employee to be heard on matters within her area of expertise. A simple practice of asking the most experienced team member for a recommendation before making a final call signals respect for expertise without undermining management authority.
4. Value Conflicts
What a value conflict is:
A value conflict occurs when two parties have fundamentally different beliefs about what is right, important, or worth prioritizing. Values are the deeply held principles that guide how people make decisions and evaluate outcomes. They include things like fairness, loyalty, achievement, creativity, stability, autonomy, and honesty.
Value conflicts are the most difficult type of conflict to resolve because values are not negotiable in the way that data, interests, and structural conditions can be. You can share more information to resolve a data conflict. You can find creative solutions that satisfy both parties' interests. You can restructure workflows to reduce structural friction. But you cannot ask someone to change what they fundamentally believe is right or important.
The goal of working through a value conflict is therefore not resolution in the sense of one party convincing the other to adopt different values. It is alignment around shared higher-level goals that both parties can pursue even while holding different values about how to get there.
Value conflicts are often misidentified as interest conflicts or relationship conflicts. The diagnostic question is whether the disagreement would persist even if both parties had all the information they needed, had their interests fully addressed, and had no structural barriers to working together. If the answer is yes, you are likely dealing in part with a values difference.
How value conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager and employee may have different values around how work should be approached. The employee values efficiency, decisiveness, and the application of proven experience. Her value system says that when you have the knowledge and the track record, you act on it. Hesitation is waste.
The manager may value thoroughness, risk management, and comprehensive preparation. His value system says that no matter how experienced you are, the downside risk of an underprepared project launch justifies additional upfront investment. Moving quickly without complete information is reckless, not efficient.
Neither of these value systems is wrong. They are simply different orientations toward work that create friction when they have to collaborate on the same project without explicitly acknowledging the difference.
How to resolve a value conflict:
Start by identifying the shared higher-level goal that both parties are genuinely committed to. In this scenario, both the manager and the employee want the project to succeed. That shared goal is the foundation for navigating their values difference.
From that shared foundation, help both parties articulate what their respective values contribute to the goal. The employee's efficiency orientation keeps the team moving and prevents the paralysis that can come from over-preparation. The manager's thoroughness orientation catches risks before they become problems and ensures the team is not building on a shaky foundation. Both contribute to project success. Neither alone is sufficient.
The practical outcome is an agreement to disagree on the underlying values while committing to a process that incorporates both. In this case, that might look like a defined and time-boxed research phase that satisfies the manager's need for thoroughness, followed by a committed launch date that satisfies the employee's need for decisive action. Neither party gets everything they would ideally want, but both get enough to feel their values were respected in the process.
Avoid trying to persuade someone that your values are correct and theirs are wrong. This approach almost never works and typically intensifies the conflict by adding a personal dimension to what was previously an operational disagreement.
5. Relationship Conflicts
What a relationship conflict is:
A relationship conflict is driven by the history, emotions, assumptions, and communication patterns between two specific people. It is the most personal type of conflict and often the hardest to address because it involves feelings that both parties may struggle to articulate and that each party may experience very differently.
Relationship conflicts frequently develop from a single negative interaction that was never properly processed. A misread tone in an email. A comment that landed badly in a meeting. A decision that felt dismissive even if it was not intended that way. Without an opportunity to address the incident directly, both parties carry their interpretation of it forward into subsequent interactions, where it colors how they perceive each other's behavior and intentions.
Over time, relationship conflicts develop what researchers call negative attribution bias. Each party begins to interpret ambiguous behavior from the other in the worst possible light. A manager who is distracted during a check-in is perceived as dismissive rather than busy. An employee who gives a brief response to a question is perceived as having an attitude rather than being focused on a deadline. The negative interpretation becomes the default, and the relationship deteriorates even in the absence of any new incident.
Relationship conflicts also have a contagious quality in teams. The tension between two people creates discomfort for everyone around them. Team members feel pressure to choose sides or navigate carefully around both parties to avoid getting caught in the middle. Collaboration suffers. Psychological safety drops. The conflict between two people becomes a team performance problem.
How relationship conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager and employee have a relationship conflict layered on top of their data, interest, structural, and values conflicts. The employee feels her manager does not trust her capabilities and holds her to a higher standard than other team members. That feeling, whether or not it accurately reflects his intentions, shapes how she interprets everything he does. His request for more research time is not heard as a strategic decision. It is heard as another instance of him doubting her.
The manager perceives the employee as sometimes having an attitude or being standoffish. He cannot identify the specific behavior that creates that impression, which suggests he is responding to a general quality of their interactions rather than specific incidents. He thinks she does excellent work and has put her on his most important project, but he does not understand why the relationship feels difficult.
Neither party has the information they need to understand how the other is experiencing their interactions. Their assumptions about each other's motivations are filling the gap and making the relationship progressively more strained.
How to resolve a relationship conflict:
Relationship conflicts require conversation, not just structural changes or information sharing. Both parties need a safe opportunity to share how they experience their interactions with the other person and to hear how the other person experiences them.
This conversation is most effective with a neutral third party facilitating, whether that is an HR professional, an external mediator, or a senior leader who both parties trust. The facilitator's role is to ensure both parties can speak without interruption, to reflect back what each person is saying so the other hears it clearly, and to redirect the conversation when it becomes accusatory rather than descriptive.
The structure that works best for this conversation asks each person to share two things: how they experience their interactions with the other person, described in terms of their own feelings and perceptions rather than accusations about the other's behavior, and what they need from the relationship to work effectively together.
In this scenario, the employee sharing that she experiences the manager's additional requirements as signals of distrust in her capabilities gives him information he does not currently have. He does not know that is how she experiences it. He might readily acknowledge that his communication style could be creating that impression unintentionally and commit to being more explicit about his confidence in her.
The manager sharing that he values her work highly enough to put her on his most important project, and that he genuinely does not understand why the relationship sometimes feels strained, gives her information she does not have. She might recognize that she has been interpreting his behavior through a lens of distrust that his actual regard for her work does not support.
Positive communication norms need to be established after the conflict conversation. Agreement to share concerns directly rather than withdrawing. Agreement to check assumptions before acting on them. Agreement to acknowledge each other's contributions explicitly and regularly. These norms need to be revisited periodically to ensure they are being maintained.
Here is the full rewrite:
The Wheel of Conflict: How to Identify the Root Cause of Workplace Conflict and Fix It
Every manager has been there. Two people on the same team who mostly get along, but the moment a disagreement surfaces, they are the first to clash. The tension spreads. Communication breaks down. The rest of the team feels it. And you are left trying to figure out where to even begin.
The problem with most approaches to workplace conflict is that they treat the symptom instead of the cause. Two people are butting heads, so you sit them down, remind them to be professional, and hope it does not happen again. It always happens again. Because the underlying cause was never identified or addressed.
The Wheel of Conflict, developed by conflict resolution expert Christopher Moore, gives you a framework for doing exactly that. Instead of reacting to conflict as a single undifferentiated problem, it breaks conflict down into five distinct root causes. Once you know which cause is driving a specific conflict, you know what kind of intervention will actually work rather than which one feels right in the moment.
This article explains every component of the Wheel of Conflict, applies it to a real workplace scenario, and gives you practical steps for resolving each type of conflict before it gets out of hand.
What Is the Wheel of Conflict?
The Wheel of Conflict is a conflict analysis framework created by Christopher Moore, a leading expert in mediation and negotiation. It proposes that every conflict, regardless of how complicated it looks on the surface, is driven by one or more of five underlying causes: data, interests, structure, values, and relationships.
Moore visualized these five causes as equal sections of a wheel, each representing a distinct source of conflict that requires a different resolution approach. The framework is widely used in mediation, organizational psychology, and leadership development because it moves conflict resolution from instinct and reaction to structured diagnosis and targeted intervention.
The core insight of the Wheel of Conflict is that not all conflicts are the same. A conflict driven by a values difference requires a completely different response than one driven by a data gap or a structural power imbalance. Applying the wrong intervention to the wrong type of conflict does not just fail to resolve the problem. It often makes it worse by addressing something the other party does not see as the real issue.
For managers and leaders, the Wheel of Conflict is most valuable as a diagnostic tool. Before you intervene in a conflict between team members, identify which of the five causes is most active. That identification determines everything that follows.
The Workplace Conflict Scenario
To make the Wheel of Conflict concrete rather than theoretical, we will apply it throughout this article to a real and recognizable workplace situation.
A manager and a senior employee are in conflict over an upcoming project. The employee has significantly more experience with this type of project than her manager and believes the team is ready to proceed. The manager wants more research time before starting and is pushing back on the timeline.
From the employee's perspective, her manager's hesitation feels like a lack of confidence in her abilities. She has done this a hundred times. His requests for more preparation feel like criticism of her competence rather than legitimate strategic caution. She also feels he holds her to a higher standard than other team members, which she experiences as unfair. When these tensions rise she becomes withdrawn and avoidant in her communication with him.
From the manager's perspective, he thinks she does excellent work. He put her on this project specifically because he trusts her. He has a promotion riding on its success, which is driving his desire for more thorough preparation. He does not understand why she sometimes seems standoffish or difficult. He perceives her as having an attitude without understanding why.
The result is poor communication, team tension, and a communication breakdown that is affecting not just their working relationship but the performance and morale of everyone around them.
This scenario contains elements of all five sources of conflict from the Wheel of Conflict. Let us work through each one.
The Five Sources of Conflict: The Wheel Explained
1. Data Conflicts
What a data conflict is:
A data conflict occurs when two parties are working from different information, incomplete information, or the same information interpreted in completely different ways. It is one of the most common and most easily resolvable types of conflict because it does not involve deeply held values or emotional wounds. It is simply a gap in shared understanding of the facts.
Data conflicts arise when one person believes they have all the relevant information and the other believes important information is missing. They arise when two people look at the same data and draw different conclusions about what it means. They arise from rumors, misinformation, and secondhand accounts that one party treats as fact. And they arise when parties disagree about how relevant or reliable specific information is for the decision at hand.
In organizations, data conflicts are particularly common in fast-moving environments where information is not consistently shared across team members, where data is siloed in different departments or systems, or where there is no agreed upon process for how decisions get made and what information is required to make them.
How data conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager believes more research is needed before proceeding. The employee believes all the necessary information is already in hand. They are not disagreeing about a value or a relationship. They are disagreeing about what they know and what they need to know. This is a data conflict.
The complicating factor is that neither party has explicitly laid out what information they have versus what they believe is missing. The employee assumes the manager's hesitation is about her ability rather than about an information gap. The manager has not articulated clearly what specific research he believes is missing and why it matters to the project's success. In the absence of explicit communication about the data, both parties are filling the gap with assumptions that are driving the conflict further.
How to resolve a data conflict:
The intervention for a data conflict is structured information sharing rather than emotional mediation. Bring both parties together specifically to answer two questions: what information do we currently have, and what information do we believe we still need before proceeding?
Create a shared document or whiteboard that lists the available data on one side and the open questions on the other. Assign specific people to find answers to specific open questions and set a deadline for when that information will be available. This transforms a vague disagreement about readiness into a concrete and trackable process.
In the manager and employee scenario, this conversation might reveal that the manager's concern is much narrower than the employee assumed. Perhaps he is specifically worried about one regulatory requirement or one competitor's recent move that he wants to understand better before committing. If the employee knew that, she might readily agree that spending two days researching that specific question is worth doing. The conflict evaporates not because feelings changed but because information was shared.
Establish a team norm for how information gets gathered and shared before major decisions. When everyone operates from a shared information standard, data conflicts become less frequent because the expectation of what constitutes sufficient information is explicit rather than assumed.
2. Interest Conflicts
What an interest conflict is:
An interest conflict occurs when two parties have different underlying motivations, needs, or goals that pull them in different directions on a specific issue. It is important to distinguish between positions and interests because they are not the same thing.
A position is what someone says they want. An interest is why they want it. Two people can hold opposite positions while actually sharing the same underlying interest, which is what makes interest conflicts resolvable when they are properly diagnosed. Conversely, two people can appear to agree on a position while having very different interests driving them, which is what makes some apparently resolved conflicts reappear.
Interest conflicts are often driven by competition, either for resources, recognition, authority, or outcomes. They frequently involve a mix of substantive interests, which are the concrete things each party needs from the situation, and psychological interests, which are the less tangible needs around respect, recognition, fairness, and autonomy.
How interest conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager's stated position is that the team needs more research time. His underlying interest, which he has not disclosed to the employee, is that this project is directly tied to his potential promotion. His interest is not just a successful project. It is an exceptionally well-prepared and low-risk project that demonstrates his leadership capability to whoever is evaluating him for promotion.
The employee's stated position is that the team is ready to proceed. Her underlying interest is in demonstrating her competence and experience, completing the project successfully on the timeline she is confident in, and being trusted to make the calls that fall within her area of expertise.
These interests are not inherently incompatible. Both parties want the project to succeed. But because neither has disclosed their underlying interests to the other, they are negotiating over positions that feel opposed rather than over interests that might be aligned.
How to resolve an interest conflict:
The intervention for an interest conflict is interest disclosure, which sounds simple but requires an environment of psychological safety to work. Encourage both parties to share not just what they want but why they want it. What is at stake for each of them? What do they need from this situation beyond the surface level outcome?
In the scenario, if the employee understood that the manager's request for more research time was not about her competence but about the particular stakes he has riding on this project, her response might change completely. She might even become an ally in making sure the preparation is thorough rather than an opponent of the additional time.
A useful facilitation question for interest conflicts is: if we could design an outcome that works for both of us, what would it need to include? This moves the conversation from competing positions to collaborative problem solving. Each party shares what they need the outcome to provide, and the group works to design something that satisfies both sets of needs rather than picking a winner and a loser.
Interest mapping is a practical tool for this process. Before the mediation conversation, have each party independently write down their top three interests in the situation, the reasons behind their stated position. Share these maps in the conversation and look for overlap and compatibility. More often than not, the interests are more aligned than the positions suggest.
3. Structural Conflicts
What a structural conflict is:
A structural conflict is caused by the conditions in which people are working rather than by anything either party has done or believes. It encompasses power imbalances, resource constraints, time pressure, geographic separation, unclear roles and responsibilities, and organizational policies that create friction between people who might otherwise work together effectively.
Structural conflicts are particularly insidious because they feel personal even though they are systemic. When one person has authority over another, decisions that are simply the exercise of that authority can feel like personal attacks or expressions of distrust to the person on the receiving end. When resources are scarce, competition for them feels like a character conflict when it is actually a structural one.
Common structural sources of conflict in organizations include unclear decision-making authority that leaves people uncertain about who has the final say on a given matter, performance evaluation systems that pit team members against each other rather than aligning them toward shared goals, workload imbalances that create resentment between people who feel they are carrying more than their share, and reporting structures that require cross-functional collaboration without giving either party the authority to make it happen.
How structural conflict appears in the scenario:
The power imbalance between the manager and employee is a structural element of their conflict. The employee has more experience with this type of project than her manager. She is, in a practical sense, more qualified to make certain calls about project readiness. But he has the formal authority that comes with his management position. This gap between practical expertise and formal authority creates structural tension that is present in every interaction they have, not just this specific disagreement.
The timeline itself is a structural element. If the employee is worried about having enough time to complete the project successfully and the manager is pushing for more upfront research, they have a real resource conflict around time that needs to be explicitly addressed rather than talked around. Adding research time at the front end reduces execution time at the back end, and that tradeoff has real consequences that should be laid out explicitly.
How to resolve a structural conflict:
Structural conflicts require structural solutions, which means adjusting the conditions rather than changing the people or their attitudes. Attitude adjustment without structural change produces temporary improvement followed by the same conflict recurring under slightly different circumstances.
For power imbalance conflicts, clarify decision-making authority explicitly. Which decisions are the manager's to make? Which are the employee's to make given her expertise? Are there categories of decisions that should be made jointly? Making this explicit removes the ambiguity that causes both parties to feel the other is overstepping.
For the timeline conflict, create a shared project plan with major milestones mapped out. Identify which milestones are flexible and which are fixed. Look at the research phase and the execution phase together and make explicit what the tradeoff is between more preparation time and less execution time. Once the tradeoff is visible, both parties can make an informed decision about where to draw the line rather than arguing from their respective gut feelings about what the timeline should be.
For ongoing structural issues around the power imbalance between management experience and functional expertise, consider creating explicit mechanisms for the employee to be heard on matters within her area of expertise. A simple practice of asking the most experienced team member for a recommendation before making a final call signals respect for expertise without undermining management authority.
4. Value Conflicts
What a value conflict is:
A value conflict occurs when two parties have fundamentally different beliefs about what is right, important, or worth prioritizing. Values are the deeply held principles that guide how people make decisions and evaluate outcomes. They include things like fairness, loyalty, achievement, creativity, stability, autonomy, and honesty.
Value conflicts are the most difficult type of conflict to resolve because values are not negotiable in the way that data, interests, and structural conditions can be. You can share more information to resolve a data conflict. You can find creative solutions that satisfy both parties' interests. You can restructure workflows to reduce structural friction. But you cannot ask someone to change what they fundamentally believe is right or important.
The goal of working through a value conflict is therefore not resolution in the sense of one party convincing the other to adopt different values. It is alignment around shared higher-level goals that both parties can pursue even while holding different values about how to get there.
Value conflicts are often misidentified as interest conflicts or relationship conflicts. The diagnostic question is whether the disagreement would persist even if both parties had all the information they needed, had their interests fully addressed, and had no structural barriers to working together. If the answer is yes, you are likely dealing in part with a values difference.
How value conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager and employee may have different values around how work should be approached. The employee values efficiency, decisiveness, and the application of proven experience. Her value system says that when you have the knowledge and the track record, you act on it. Hesitation is waste.
The manager may value thoroughness, risk management, and comprehensive preparation. His value system says that no matter how experienced you are, the downside risk of an underprepared project launch justifies additional upfront investment. Moving quickly without complete information is reckless, not efficient.
Neither of these value systems is wrong. They are simply different orientations toward work that create friction when they have to collaborate on the same project without explicitly acknowledging the difference.
How to resolve a value conflict:
Start by identifying the shared higher-level goal that both parties are genuinely committed to. In this scenario, both the manager and the employee want the project to succeed. That shared goal is the foundation for navigating their values difference.
From that shared foundation, help both parties articulate what their respective values contribute to the goal. The employee's efficiency orientation keeps the team moving and prevents the paralysis that can come from over-preparation. The manager's thoroughness orientation catches risks before they become problems and ensures the team is not building on a shaky foundation. Both contribute to project success. Neither alone is sufficient.
The practical outcome is an agreement to disagree on the underlying values while committing to a process that incorporates both. In this case, that might look like a defined and time-boxed research phase that satisfies the manager's need for thoroughness, followed by a committed launch date that satisfies the employee's need for decisive action. Neither party gets everything they would ideally want, but both get enough to feel their values were respected in the process.
Avoid trying to persuade someone that your values are correct and theirs are wrong. This approach almost never works and typically intensifies the conflict by adding a personal dimension to what was previously an operational disagreement.
5. Relationship Conflicts
What a relationship conflict is:
A relationship conflict is driven by the history, emotions, assumptions, and communication patterns between two specific people. It is the most personal type of conflict and often the hardest to address because it involves feelings that both parties may struggle to articulate and that each party may experience very differently.
Relationship conflicts frequently develop from a single negative interaction that was never properly processed. A misread tone in an email. A comment that landed badly in a meeting. A decision that felt dismissive even if it was not intended that way. Without an opportunity to address the incident directly, both parties carry their interpretation of it forward into subsequent interactions, where it colors how they perceive each other's behavior and intentions.
Over time, relationship conflicts develop what researchers call negative attribution bias. Each party begins to interpret ambiguous behavior from the other in the worst possible light. A manager who is distracted during a check-in is perceived as dismissive rather than busy. An employee who gives a brief response to a question is perceived as having an attitude rather than being focused on a deadline. The negative interpretation becomes the default, and the relationship deteriorates even in the absence of any new incident.
Relationship conflicts also have a contagious quality in teams. The tension between two people creates discomfort for everyone around them. Team members feel pressure to choose sides or navigate carefully around both parties to avoid getting caught in the middle. Collaboration suffers. Psychological safety drops. The conflict between two people becomes a team performance problem.
How relationship conflict appears in the scenario:
The manager and employee have a relationship conflict layered on top of their data, interest, structural, and values conflicts. The employee feels her manager does not trust her capabilities and holds her to a higher standard than other team members. That feeling, whether or not it accurately reflects his intentions, shapes how she interprets everything he does. His request for more research time is not heard as a strategic decision. It is heard as another instance of him doubting her.
The manager perceives the employee as sometimes having an attitude or being standoffish. He cannot identify the specific behavior that creates that impression, which suggests he is responding to a general quality of their interactions rather than specific incidents. He thinks she does excellent work and has put her on his most important project, but he does not understand why the relationship feels difficult.
Neither party has the information they need to understand how the other is experiencing their interactions. Their assumptions about each other's motivations are filling the gap and making the relationship progressively more strained.
How to resolve a relationship conflict:
Relationship conflicts require conversation, not just structural changes or information sharing. Both parties need a safe opportunity to share how they experience their interactions with the other person and to hear how the other person experiences them.
This conversation is most effective with a neutral third party facilitating, whether that is an HR professional, an external mediator, or a senior leader who both parties trust. The facilitator's role is to ensure both parties can speak without interruption, to reflect back what each person is saying so the other hears it clearly, and to redirect the conversation when it becomes accusatory rather than descriptive.
The structure that works best for this conversation asks each person to share two things: how they experience their interactions with the other person, described in terms of their own feelings and perceptions rather than accusations about the other's behavior, and what they need from the relationship to work effectively together.
In this scenario, the employee sharing that she experiences the manager's additional requirements as signals of distrust in her capabilities gives him information he does not currently have. He does not know that is how she experiences it. He might readily acknowledge that his communication style could be creating that impression unintentionally and commit to being more explicit about his confidence in her.
The manager sharing that he values her work highly enough to put her on his most important project, and that he genuinely does not understand why the relationship sometimes feels strained, gives her information she does not have. She might recognize that she has been interpreting his behavior through a lens of distrust that his actual regard for her work does not support.
Positive communication norms need to be established after the conflict conversation. Agreement to share concerns directly rather than withdrawing. Agreement to check assumptions before acting on them. Agreement to acknowledge each other's contributions explicitly and regularly. These norms need to be revisited periodically to ensure they are being maintained.
How to Apply the Wheel of Conflict as a Manager at Work
The Wheel of Conflict is most powerful when you use it before you intervene, not during. When you observe conflict between team members, your instinct is to step in and resolve it. The Wheel of Conflict asks you to first diagnose it.
Before your next conflict intervention, ask yourself which of the five causes is most active in this specific situation. Is the conflict primarily about information gaps? About competing motivations? About structural conditions? About values differences? About relationship history and communication patterns?
Most real conflicts involve more than one cause simultaneously, as the scenario in this article demonstrates. When multiple causes are active, address them in order of most to least tractable. Data conflicts are usually easiest to resolve. Relationship conflicts take the longest. Starting with the data conversation creates quick wins that build trust and goodwill for the harder conversations about interests, values, and relationships.
Document your conflict diagnoses over time. If you notice that the same cause keeps driving conflicts in your team, the solution is not more individual mediation. It is a systemic change to the condition producing that cause. Recurring data conflicts suggest your information sharing processes need improvement. Recurring interest conflicts suggest your goal-setting and incentive structures may be misaligned. Recurring structural conflicts suggest your role definitions and decision-making authority need to be clarified.
The goal is not to eliminate conflict. Conflict is a natural and often productive feature of teams with diverse perspectives and high standards. The goal is to ensure that conflict surfaces, gets diagnosed accurately, and gets resolved at the root cause level so that the energy spent on it produces better decisions and stronger working relationships rather than being wasted on repeated cycles of the same unresolved tensions.
Frequently Asked Questions About Conflict at Work
What is the Wheel of Conflict?
The Wheel of Conflict is a conflict analysis framework developed by mediator and negotiation expert Christopher Moore. It identifies five root causes of conflict: data conflicts caused by information gaps or differing interpretations, interest conflicts caused by competing motivations and goals, structural conflicts caused by power imbalances and resource constraints, value conflicts caused by differing fundamental beliefs, and relationship conflicts caused by emotions, assumptions, and communication patterns. The framework helps managers and mediators diagnose the specific cause of a conflict before selecting an intervention strategy.
What are the five sources of conflict in the Wheel of Conflict?
The five sources are data, interests, structure, values, and relationships. Data conflicts stem from incomplete or differently interpreted information. Interest conflicts stem from competing motivations or goals. Structural conflicts stem from power imbalances, resource constraints, or unclear roles. Value conflicts stem from fundamentally different beliefs about what is right or important. Relationship conflicts stem from negative emotional history, assumptions, and poor communication patterns between specific individuals.
How do you handle conflict at work?
Handling conflict at work effectively starts with diagnosing the root cause before intervening. Use a framework like the Wheel of Conflict to identify whether the conflict is driven by a data gap, competing interests, structural conditions, values differences, or relationship history. Match your intervention to the cause: share information for data conflicts, facilitate interest disclosure for interest conflicts, restructure conditions for structural conflicts, find shared goals for values conflicts, and create structured dialogue for relationship conflicts. Addressing the root cause rather than the surface behavior produces lasting resolution rather than temporary calm.
What is the difference between an interest conflict and a values conflict?
An interest conflict is about what people want from a specific situation and can often be resolved by finding solutions that satisfy both parties' needs simultaneously. A values conflict is about what people fundamentally believe is right or important and cannot be resolved by finding a middle ground on the values themselves. The intervention for an interest conflict is collaborative problem solving. The intervention for a values conflict is identifying a shared higher-level goal that both parties can pursue even while holding different values about how to get there.
Why do workplace conflicts keep recurring even after they seem resolved?
Recurring conflicts almost always indicate that the root cause was not addressed. If a conflict between two people is resolved through a conversation about communication styles but the underlying data gap, structural condition, or values difference that drove the conflict is never addressed, the same conflict will resurface under slightly different circumstances. Sustainable resolution requires identifying and addressing the actual cause using a diagnostic framework rather than treating the behavioral symptoms.
How do you resolve a relationship conflict between two employees?
Resolving a relationship conflict requires a structured conversation between both parties in a psychologically safe environment, ideally facilitated by a neutral third party. Each person should have the opportunity to describe how they experience their interactions with the other in terms of their own perceptions and feelings rather than accusations. Each should also share what they need from the relationship to work effectively together. The facilitator helps both parties hear each other accurately and establishes positive communication norms for the relationship going forward. Relationship conflicts take longer to resolve than data or structural conflicts and require ongoing maintenance to prevent recurrence.
When should a manager involve HR in a workplace conflict?
Involve HR when the conflict involves potential policy violations, harassment, discrimination, or legal risk. Involve HR when the conflict has persisted despite your direct intervention and is significantly affecting team performance or individual wellbeing. Involve HR when you are personally involved in the conflict and cannot serve as a neutral facilitator. And involve HR when either party requests it, which should always be honored regardless of your assessment of the conflict's severity.
Try Updoot free today to document conflict and performance issues so they get resolved.
References recommended to learn more about sources of conflict and handling.
Moore, C. W., (1996). Sphere of Conflict- Causes and Interventions. [PDF]. The Meditation Process. Retrieved from http://www2.hawaii.edu/~barkai/HO/Moore%27s%20sphere%20of%20conflict.PDF.
SMD. (2016, Aug 5). Christopher Moore’s Circle of Conflict. SMD. Retrieved from http://smilemundo.com/moore-circle-of-conflict/.
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