The Real Reason Your Team's Same Conflicts Keep Resurfacing
by Tess Brigham, Certified Coach & Licensed Therapist
You've run the team-building day. You've done the conflict resolution training. And somehow the exact same tension between the exact same two people is back on your desk this quarter, wearing a slightly different outfit. That's not a sign your interventions failed. It's a sign the conflict never actually reached the two people who own it.
It went somewhere else instead. It usually does.
This article expands on a recent episode of The Gen Mess with Tess, where I explore generational differences, communication, and psychological safety in modern workplaces.
Why Does the Same Office Conflict Keep Coming Back?
Family systems psychologist Murray Bowen described this pattern decades ago under the name triangulation.¹ His insight was that a two-person relationship under stress is inherently unstable. All the tension has exactly one place to go, straight at the other person. Pull in a third point, a manager, HR, a sympathetic coworker, and suddenly that tension has somewhere else to sit. A triangle absorbs pressure that two people alone cannot.
At work, that third point shows up constantly. A manager becomes the unofficial referee for two employees who won't deal with each other directly. HR quietly becomes the permanent landing spot for grievances nobody wants to raise face to face. A coworker becomes the person someone vents to about their manager every single week.
None of this is a communication skills problem. It's a stability problem. The triangle is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is why training people to "just communicate directly" so rarely sticks on its own.
Why Does Your Employee Engagement Survey Miss This Completely?
Here's what makes triangulation almost invisible to the systems you use to measure team health. Venting to a third person produces real relief. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar's work on social bonding suggests that talking through frustrations with someone else is closer to an ancient trust-building behavior than a character flaw.² The tension in your chest actually eases. The person doing the venting walks away feeling heard.
Which means when your engagement survey asks something like "Do you feel heard by the people around you," the honest answer might genuinely be yes. That doesn't mean the conflict got resolved. It means it found a working outlet that has nothing to do with the person who actually needs to hear it. Your dashboard can look calm while the same unresolved tension keeps quietly circulating underneath it.
That gap matters more than it looks. Research on unresolved workplace conflict has found that a large majority of employees stuck in ongoing conflict eventually disengage from their work entirely, even when they report feeling supported in the moment.³ The relief is real and temporary. The disengagement is slower and permanent.
What Conflict is Costing Your Team Behind the Data
The financial picture backs this up. The widely cited CPP Global Human Capital Report found that U.S. employees spend roughly 2.8 hours a week dealing with workplace conflict, adding up to an estimated $359 billion in paid hours annually.⁴ Separate research on conflict-competent leadership has found that managers can spend somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of their time managing disputes, much of it as the unofficial third point rather than actually resolving anything between the two people involved.⁵
None of that shows up as a line item anywhere. It shows up as a manager who's mysteriously always busy, a team that burns a surprising amount of every one-on-one on relationship processing instead of actual work, and conflicts that resurface every few months because the real conversation never happened.
What Should A Manager Do To Resolve Office Conflict
Not "create a channel for people to feel heard." That phrase has been said so often it's stopped meaning anything. Here's what it looks like concretely.
Notice who's become the designated third point.
If you find yourself functioning as the permanent referee for the same two people, or if you notice an unusually tight bond on your team built almost entirely around shared complaints about you or about the work, that's not a personality quirk. That's a signal worth naming, even just to yourself first.
Ask a question that actually invites a real answer.
In one-on-ones, try "Is there anything you've been sitting on that you haven't brought to me directly?" instead of "How's everything going?" The second question gets you a status update. The first one occasionally gets you the truth.
Protect the first time someone goes direct.
If someone finally risks a direct conversation and gets a defensive reaction, even an internal one that leaks out, they won't try it again, and you'll have just taught your whole team that venting to a third party is the safer option. The first direct conversation someone attempts is the one that decides whether they ever attempt a second.
Stop pretending the fix is a policy.
You cannot mediate your way out of triangulation with a rule against gossip. The fix is becoming someone people don't feel they need to protect themselves from in the first place.
The Bottom Line
A conflict that gets vented instead of resolved doesn't disappear. It goes quiet, then resurfaces, usually wearing a slightly different outfit than the last time. Your survey scores can look fine the entire time this is happening, because the people involved genuinely are getting something real out of the arrangement, just not resolution. If you want fewer repeat conflicts on your team, the place to look isn't your policy binder. It's who has quietly become the third point for tension that belongs to two other people.
References
Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press.
Passive Secrets (2025), as cited in Workplace Conflict Statistics 2026.
CPP Global (2008). Workplace Conflict and How Businesses Can Harness It to Thrive. CPP Global Human Capital Report.
Runde, C. E., & Flanagan, T. A. Becoming a Conflict Competent Leader. Jossey-Bass.