Workplace conflict mediation: what if the organisation helped create the conflict?
Sometimes we send two people to mediation for a conflict the organisation helped create.
Two colleagues are no longer getting on. Communication has deteriorated. Other people are taking sides. Eventually, HR becomes involved and mediation is suggested.
Sometimes mediation is exactly the right intervention.
But before sending two people into a room to repair their relationship, there is another question worth asking:
Why did this relationship break down in the first place?
Because what looks interpersonal on the surface is not always interpersonal underneath.
When workplace conflict looks like a personality problem
Once a relationship has deteriorated, attention naturally settles on the two people involved.
They may avoid one another, interpret comments negatively or disagree in meetings. Colleagues may begin to take sides. The situation becomes “the conflict between these two people”.
That description may be accurate, but incomplete.
Perhaps their responsibilities overlap. Perhaps nobody is clear about who has authority. They may be competing for the same resources or working towards priorities that pull them in different directions.
Senior leaders may have avoided making a difficult decision, allowing the tension to travel downwards. Or there may be a longstanding pattern of behaviour that has never been addressed.
By the time mediation is proposed, the conflict is visible in the relationship. That does not necessarily mean the relationship is where it began.
What research tells us about the causes of incivility
Recent research gives us good reason to look beyond the individuals involved.
Yaqoob and colleagues reviewed 24 years of workplace incivility research in a systematic review published in 2025. Drawing on 76 empirical studies, they examined the antecedents, mediators and moderators of incivility at work.
Their findings show that the antecedents of incivility do not sit solely within individuals. They span individual, situational and organisational factors.
That distinction matters. If a difficult workplace relationship is considered only in terms of the personalities, communication styles or behaviour of the two people involved, important parts of the problem may remain out of view.
The immediate conflict may involve two colleagues. The conditions affecting it can extend far beyond them.
Workplace mistreatment interventions operate at different levels
Leake, Amankwaa and de Pater reached a related conclusion in their systematic review of workplace mistreatment interventions. Published online in 2025 and appearing in the 2026 volume of the Journal of Business Ethics, the review included 40 intervention studies from 38 articles.
The researchers found a wide range of approaches operating at different levels. These included individual training and workshops, as well as team and organisational interventions such as policy changes and work on organisational culture.
This does not mean that individual interventions are unhelpful. It means workplace mistreatment and conflict may need to be addressed at more than one level.
Mediation may support the people involved. The organisation may still need to address the conditions surrounding them.
What workplace mediation can do
Mediation can help two people understand one another, repair harm and agree a different way of working.
It can create a structured space for each person to explain their experience and listen to the other. It may help them identify misunderstandings, recognise the effect of their behaviour and make practical agreements about how they will work together in future.
Where the main difficulty sits within the relationship, that may be exactly what is needed.
Even when wider organisational conditions have contributed, mediation can still form part of the response. Two people may need support to deal with the impact of what has happened between them while the organisation addresses the factors that made the conflict more likely or harder to resolve.
The risk comes when mediation is treated as the whole solution without examining anything beyond the room.
What mediation cannot fix on its own
Imagine two colleagues complete mediation and agree to communicate more directly. They return to work with a better understanding of each other.
But their roles still overlap. Nobody has clarified who can make the final decision. They still depend on the same limited resource, and their performance expectations continue to reward competing outcomes.
How long will their new agreement hold?
Or imagine that one person has raised concerns about a longstanding pattern of behaviour. Mediation encourages both parties to move forward, but the organisation never decides whether that behaviour was acceptable or how similar concerns should be handled.
The relationship may improve. The underlying ambiguity remains.
Mediation cannot, by itself, clarify a confused structure, resolve competing organisational priorities, allocate scarce resources or create accountability for behaviour that leaders have repeatedly avoided addressing.
If those factors contributed to the conflict, sending both people back into the same conditions may limit what the mediation can achieve.
Questions to ask before referring colleagues to mediation
Before deciding that mediation is the right intervention, it is worth exploring the conflict at several levels.
The relationship
What has happened between the two people?
Is there harm, misunderstanding or a loss of trust that they need help to address?
Are both people willing and able to take part in mediation?
What would need to change in how they work together?
The work
Are their roles and responsibilities clear?
Do their responsibilities overlap in ways that create friction?
Is decision-making authority understood?
Are they competing for resources, recognition or influence?
Do their targets or professional priorities pull them in different directions?
The organisation
Have leaders avoided a decision that needs to be made?
Has a pattern of poor behaviour been left unaddressed?
Are policies and expectations applied consistently?
Are there wider team dynamics, cliques or status differences affecting the conflict?
What will need to change around the relationship if mediation is to hold?
These questions do not replace a careful assessment of whether mediation is appropriate.
They help establish whether mediation is enough.
Why conflict returns after mediation
When conflict resurfaces, it can be tempting to conclude that the participants did not commit to the process or failed to use what they learned.
Sometimes that may be part of the explanation.
But recurrence may also tell us that the conditions sustaining the conflict were never changed. If people remain caught between unclear roles, contradictory expectations or unaddressed power dynamics, the same tension can return in a slightly different form.
The next disagreement may look like another interpersonal failure. In reality, it may be the same organisational problem becoming visible again.
This is why follow-up matters. Agreements made during mediation need to be workable in the environment to which people return. Where wider action was identified, somebody needs to take responsibility for it.
Repair the relationship and examine the conditions
Sometimes the relationship needs repairing.
Sometimes the conditions around the relationship do too.
The choice is not necessarily between mediation and organisational change. A more useful response may involve both: supporting the people to address what has happened between them while also changing the roles, priorities, decisions or cultural patterns that contributed to the breakdown.
If we send two people straight back into the same unclear roles, competing priorities or organisational dynamics that helped create the conflict, how much have we really fixed?
In situations where conflict keeps resurfacing despite mediation, training or attempts to repair relationships,
I help organisations diagnose the relational, cultural and systemic conditions that may be keeping it going.
References
Yaqoob, S., Shahzad, K., Faisal, M., Kitchlew, N., & Abualigah, A. (2025). Why, how, and when incivility unfolds in the workplace: A 24-year systematic literature review. Management Review Quarterly.
Leake, G., Amankwaa, A., & de Pater, I. E. (2026). Workplace mistreatment: A systematic review of interventions and future research agenda. Journal of Business Ethics, 204, 523–564.
Nicole Williams is an occupational and coaching psychologist specialising in culture repair, team dynamics and psychologically safe workplaces.
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