Jealousy, envy, perceived unfairness in workload distribution, colleagues acting like “prima donnas”: anyone leading a team knows that relational conflict rarely stays confined to two people. The most insidious risk for someone in a management role isn’t the initial spark itself, but its spread: uninvolved colleagues starting to “take sides,” subgroups polarizing, a climate that deteriorates even for people who never experienced the conflict firsthand.
Organizational research confirms this contagion mechanism. A study published in the Academy of Management Journal showed that relationship conflict within a team doesn’t stay contained: it tends to spill over into individual behaviors of hostility and social undermining between coworkers, including ones initially uninvolved in the dispute. A second body of research, conducted on more than 500 public-sector employees, found that unmanaged interpersonal conflict fuels informal social exclusion within the group, which in turn encourages misconduct such as gossip or the informal sidelining of a colleague.
From the labor-consulting side, triangulation — the often-unconscious tendency to seek allies instead of addressing the other party directly — explains why colleagues “take sides”: if the manager themselves acts as a “messenger” between the two people in disagreement, they inadvertently license the whole team to do the same.
When the conflict is between the manager and an employee
There is, however, a scenario that must be treated separately, because it completely changes the nature of the problem: one in which the manager isn’t an external mediator, but one of the two parties involved — and is themselves the one carrying out, in retaliation, behaviors aimed at isolating the person, damaging their professional image in front of colleagues, and building a relational and operational void around them.
Occupational psychology has a precise name for this pattern: vertical mobbing. In the original definition by Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann, author of the first systematic study on the phenomenon, mobbing is distinguished from ordinary conflict because it consists of hostile actions repeated over an extended period, explicitly including systematic social isolation and damage to the victim’s professional reputation in front of the group. This is exactly the pattern of someone who, after a direct conflict, begins publicly delegitimizing an employee by making them look incompetent, excluding them from information, meetings, or visibility opportunities.
When the source of hostile behavior is the person who holds hierarchical power over the victim, experts agree on one crucial point: the power imbalance often makes direct mediation or informal confrontation inadequate, because the affected person isn’t starting from an equal footing. This is where the strategies identified by research on resilience and mobbing as genuinely protective become decisive.
What psychologists and labor consultants recommend to people experiencing this type of harassment
- Document systematically: keep a written record with dates, concrete facts, any witnesses, and relevant emails. This is the essential basis for any subsequent step, formal or informal, and helps maintain a clear view of events even when stress makes everything more confusing.
- Don’t isolate yourself further: a prospective study of over two thousand employees found that social support — from coworkers and from outside work — combined with active coping styles, significantly reduces the psychological impact of bullying over time. Actively seeking trusted relationships, even outside the immediate team, works against the very goal of the harassment.
- Use formal internal channels (HR, whistleblowing function, union representation where available) rather than facing the situation alone: precisely because of the power imbalance, experts point to structured channels — not direct confrontation — as the more effective route when hostile behavior comes from above.
- Preserve evidence of your own competence: independently keep track of achieved goals, positive feedback, and past evaluations. This is a concrete counterweight to a deliberately constructed narrative of “incompetence,” and is useful both internally and in any external proceedings.
- Seek specific professional support: a labor consultant to understand available protections, a psychologist to avoid carrying the emotional weight alone. The literature is clear: no individual coping style, however effective, fully protects against intense or prolonged bullying — one more reason not to try to handle the situation alone.
The sign that peer-conflict management is working is that the group stays united without taking sides. When the source is someone who holds power over the victim, the first useful step isn’t repairing the group — it’s breaking the isolation and bringing the situation outside the room where it was created.
Sources
- Yu, L. T., & Zellmer-Bruhn, M. (2018). Introducing Team Mindfulness and Considering Its Safeguard Role Against Conflict Transformation and Social Undermining. Academy of Management Journal, 61(1), 324–347.
- Belgasm, H., Alzubi, A., Iyiola, K., & Khadem, A. (2025). Interpersonal Conflict and Employee Behavior in the Public Sector. Behavioral Sciences, DOI: 10.3390/bs15020194.
- Leymann, H. (1996). The Content and Development of Mobbing at Work. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 5(2), 165–184.
- Prospective study on resilience, coping, and social support in workplace bullying, 2,036 public employees, PMC (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9756524).
- SIOP White Paper, Workplace Bullying: Causes, Consequences, and Intervention Strategies (siop.org).
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