Common Causes of Team Conflict

There are many reasons of bad conflict within a team or between teams. Conflict tends to throw a team off of its focus, getting it away from its goals and objectives. As team collaboration is one of the primary focuses of Agile, so Scrum Masters, team members need to intervene to resolve conflicts, to help teams move from conflict to constructive disagreement as a catapult to high performance.

We would like to collate factors that influence interpersonal relationships and collaboration on teams. Which causes of conflict are most common on your team? You may vote with one or more "dots" per selection.

The Options

• Competing goals: Goals of team members, that compete with each other, such that the pursuit of one goal detracts from the pursuit of the other.
• Misunderstanding of job responsibilities: Lack of information or misunderstanding of roles and responsibilities.
• Misunderstanding of requirements: Lack of information or misunderstanding of business need.
• Interdependence: Dependency on team members for completion of work
• Feedback mechanism: Missing frequent and genuine feedback from peers / leaders
• Performance appraisal system: Appraisals that measure individual performance rather than teamwork.
• Conflict of interest between team members
• Disagreement about strategy: for achieving team goals
• Disagreement about execution: of strategy for achieving team goals
• Lack of focus: Isolated functions without mutual goals commitment
• Poor planning: Poor planning in terms of work division, task allocation etc.
• Blame Culture: Blame others in case of missed deadlines, missed goals
• Self-centered: Not acting as part of the team
• Seeking individual recognition
• Lack of knowledge of agile principles and values.
• Fear of failure: For example not acting for fear of failing, blaming others for one’s own failures, hiding errors and so on.
• Lack of team responsibility: self-centered attitude, not feeling a part of team success and failures