Where does conflict collide?

The perceived incompatibility that arises among the members of a work group, usually separated into task conflict, disagreement about the content of the work, and relationship conflict, interpersonal friction and personal tension. Jehn's 1995 A Multimethod Examination of the Benefits and Detriments of Intragroup Conflict distinguished these types and showed their different links to group functioning, and De Dreu and Weingart's 2003 meta-analysis Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction found that both types tend to depress team outcomes. The referent is a reported state of disagreement inside a small group of people, and it is not organised violence between states, a divergence of genetic interests, or two operations clashing over shared data.[1][2]

Unit

One team's perceived level of task and relationship disagreement

Recovery means

Addressed through conflict-resolution norms, facilitation, and mediation

Measured by

Self-report survey scales rating how much disagreement and friction members perceive in the group

A contested incompatibility concerning government or territory in which the use of armed force between two parties, at least one of them the government of a state, results in battle-related deaths above a set threshold. Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Eriksson, Sollenberg, and Strand's 2002 Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset defined and catalogued such conflicts, treating at least 25 battle deaths in a calendar year as the mark of an active armed conflict. The referent is organised political violence recorded at the level of states and armed groups, and it is not interpersonal friction inside a team, an evolutionary tug over parental investment, or clashing writes to shared data.[3]

Unit

One active state-based armed conflict in a given year, at 25 or more battle deaths

Recovery means

Ends in peace agreement, ceasefire, victory, or activity falling below the threshold

Measured by

Coded from event records against a battle-death threshold and stated incompatibility criteria

The evolutionary conflict of interest that follows from a parent and its offspring not being genetically identical, so the amount of parental investment favoured by selection acting on the offspring exceeds the amount favoured by selection acting on the parent. Trivers's 1974 Parent-Offspring Conflict modelled this divergence in terms of inclusive fitness and predicted observable behavioural conflict, such as struggles during weaning, as its expression. The referent is a divergence of genetic interests worked out over evolutionary time, and it is not a disagreement people report on a survey, a war between states, or an inconsistency between concurrent database operations.[4]

Unit

The gap between parent-optimal and offspring-optimal investment, in fitness terms

Recovery means

Not applicable, as it is a standing evolutionary tendency rather than an event that resolves

Measured by

Inferred from behaviour such as weaning conflict and from formal inclusive-fitness models

In concurrency control, two operations conflict when they access the same data item and at least one of them is a write, so their relative order can change the result and an uncontrolled interleaving can break serializability. Bernstein and Goodman's 1981 survey Concurrency Control in Distributed Database Systems set out this notion of conflicting operations and the protocols that schedule transactions so the outcome stays equivalent to some serial order. The referent is a formal incompatibility between concurrent read and write operations on shared state, and it is not friction in a team, violence between states, or a divergence of genetic interests.[5]

Unit

A pair of operations on one data item where at least one is a write

Recovery means

Resolved by a scheduler enforcing a serializable order through locking, timestamps, or validation

Measured by

Detected from the read and write sets of transactions, for example via a conflict (serializability) graph