Conflict management: is a shared goal enough to bring two departments together?
When two departments clash, managers often invoke the collective interest without changing what makes their priorities incompatible. The useful question is more precise: under what conditions can a shared goal reduce conflict between departments?
What the literature establishes
Morton Deutsch (1949, Human Relations) proposes a theory of cooperation and competition based on goal interdependence: the relationship changes depending on whether one party's success facilitates or undermines the other's. This is not experimental evidence that a unifying message works, but a framework for understanding the structure of interactions. Two departments can therefore share an official mission while their operational objectives keep them in a competitive relationship.
A goal that genuinely requires the other party
Muzafer Sherif (1958, American Journal of Sociology) describes field experiments in which superordinate goals, unattainable by either group alone, help reduce hostility between groups. The mechanism is not simply increased contact: it makes cooperation necessary to achieve an outcome that both groups value. For managers, this suggests distinguishing a stated shared ambition from a concrete problem whose resolution requires contributions from both departments.
The premature conclusion
One might infer that adding a shared performance indicator is enough to ease relations. These studies do not support that conclusion: an indicator may remain secondary to contradictory individual objectives, or place the burden on just one department. A shared goal therefore replaces neither an examination of how constraints are distributed nor attention to the substantive disagreement. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
The experiments presented by Sherif involve groups of boys at a summer camp, not professionals subject to regulatory obligations and enduring hierarchical relationships. Applying their findings to organisations is a working hypothesis, not a guarantee of results. Common practice has a further limitation: invoking cooperation can delegitimise a well-founded objection, particularly when a department must uphold a compliance or quality requirement.
A practical check in Genève
Within SHR's « Gestion du conflit » programme, an exercise applicable in Genève would be to select an interdepartmental disagreement: handling a case in private banking, coordinating a project in an international organisation, delivering an order in luxury watchmaking or approving a commodity trading transaction. Over four weeks, the departments would define an outcome requiring contributions from both, non-negotiable requirements and a deadline, then record each disagreement and the agreed action. The measure would be the proportion of recorded disagreements for which the action was completed by the deadline and confirmed by both departments, retaining the numerator and denominator for verification. Comparing this proportion with that of a documented previous period would provide a local reference point, without by itself proving that the shared goal caused any improvement. To go further: explore the Conflict Management training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Conflict Management in Geneva
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