Role Friction: Causes and Resolution

Workplace friction and conflict are something every company wants to avoid. It unbalances the work environment and negatively impacts culture. It’s something that can destroy teams, productivity, and motivation. 

 Role friction may not seem like an obvious factor in friction and conflict, however, a recent article published in Forbes describes exactly how role friction is a major factor in organisational conflict. 

What is role friction?

Role friction arises when there is limited clarity on individual and team roles. Even if each employee knows their role consider these questions:

How much authority does that role have?

• What decisions can the person make?

• What is the level of responsibility?

• What is this role held accountable for?

The trick to avoiding role friction is to ensure authority, responsibility and accountability are balanced. 

Individual roles

The Forbes article describes that “One of the most frustrating things for leaders, for example, is when they are held accountable for something but don't have the authority to do what they think is needed to make that happen. And when leaders have more authority than accountability, they can do real damage.

There's also a kind of role friction that happens when there's a mismatch between a person and the role they're in. That's usually thought about in terms of competencies, whether someone has the knowledge, skills, and abilities to be successful in their role. But there's a whole other level. We each have a natural way of getting things done, a way we approach problems when we're "in our zone." Some of us are more comfortable with risk and want to try things and then adapt, while others are very risk averse. Some of us want to first gather lots of information and weigh it carefully before moving forward, while others are comfortable knowing just enough to craft a new step.”

One way to avoid individual role friction is to clarify exactly what role, responsibility, authority, and decision-making abilities a person has. Even if your organisation has a flat structure, it’s important that people know what and who they are responsible for.

If responsibilities and roles change, make sure people know how this impacts them. 

Between people

Although individual role friction is a very valid form of friction, toxic friction and conflict is often seen between roles. One example of this is role overlap. This includes having the same role, responsibilities, and authority. 

Forbes explained “For example, in one of our client organizations, two different roles thought they had authority for product placement, so they kept changing each other's work. Another example is goal conflict. I had a client who was responsible for overall employee satisfaction with training programs. Another employee was responsible for moving as many of the trainings as possible online in order to save money, but online trainings had lower satisfaction ratings and thus impacted the measures for my client's performance. So the more one leader was successful, the more the other wasn't.

Let's look a little deeper at the last example. Because their goals were in conflict, the tendency was to blame the other for bad intentions. The one responsible for overall satisfaction of training programs saw the other as pulling things online that were better delivered in-person, just so that leader's numbers looked better. The other leader, of course, thought that the other was living in the Stone Age, attached to in-person trainings just so their numbers looked better, at the expense of organizational priorities. They blamed each other, a natural result of role friction.”