Too hot to handle?

Amy C. Edmondson, Diana McLain Smith, Harvard Business School. Division of Research

Conventional wisdom - together with the weight of published management advice - recommends that managers engage task conflict but avoid relationship conflict to have productive discussions. Implicit in this advice is the premise that it is indeed possible to separate them. This article argues, in contrast, that it is neither possible nor desirable to avoid relationship conflict, due to well-documented properties of human cognition.