Conflict Resolution and Culture - What’s the link?

Conflict in the workplace is inevitable and comes in all shapes and sizes, as do the approaches organisations take to address and resolve them. These approaches can range from proactively equipping teams with the skills to navigate and confidently address conflict, following formal grievance procedures, and everything in between, including coaching, mediation & investigations. An important consideration is the residual feeling parties are left with following repair-attempts or ‘resolution’. How do you want parties to feel, behave, talk about and role model - following a conflict? More importantly, how does this align to your Organisation’s culture?

What is Kintsugi?

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of taking a treasured vessel, traditionally a vase, that is passed down between the generations within a family; when the vessel eventually cracks or breaks, one mixes gold with adhesive urushi sap, and uses this mixture to fill the cracks, repairing the item.The result, aside from repair, is the creation of a strong, beautiful and unique object.

How do we create kintsugi in relationships? When conflict arises, relationships are impacted - from hairline fractures to being completely severed. To “kintsugi” a relationship, parties need to be brought back together, creating a joint way forward and paving a new future way of working and communicating.

To enable this to occur, people need to feel safe enough to communicate their true feelings, respectfully. Creating a space where shared understanding and common goals are recognised and agreed. Feeling heard, understood and cared for is paramount for what we call relational kintsugi to occur.

Following a successful mediation the adjectives parties often use such as ‘heard’, ‘understood’, ‘empowered’, these are tell-tale signs that relational kintsugi has taken place. As we will outline below, relational kintsugi is the art of repairing relationships, rendering them stronger, more unique, and beautiful than they were to begin with.

How Does This Relate to Organisational Culture?

We’ve touched on the “residual feeling” parties are left with following a conflict. When relational kintsugi has occurred, parties return to the workplace with a renewed sense of hope, empowerment and confidence. However, the positive impacts, at an individual level, are only half the story.

Pouring the metaphorical gold into the cracks of relationships dials down the temperature in the wider team and organisation, impacting the overall culture.

If we think of toxic behaviour, the kintsugi-repair introduces healthy relationship skills and ultimately creates room for better, rebuilt, stronger relationships to thrive. Organisations are made up of relationships – multiple people connected to multiple others. The quality of these relationships informs and impacts the overall organisational culture.

What is the Relationship Between Kintsugi and Psychological Safety?

“Team psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that it’s OK to take risks, to express their ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions, and to admit mistakes — all without fear of negative consequences.” – Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review¹

Psychological safety is a prerequisite for relational kintsugi to occur. This requires trust, respect and openness. When organisations struggle to achieve these pre-conditions, not all is lost. A third party neutral, such as a facilitator or mediator, who can create these conditions can become an invaluable tool to catalyse relational repair.

Accepting that conflict will always occur, organisations can choose how to respond. By nurturing an environment where employees constructively address, resolve and move forward following a conflict, creates psychological safety.

Another way to think about think about psychological safety is by thinking about the Window of Tolerance.

Introducing Some Theory: The Window of Tolerance

When people are within their window of tolerance (“WoT”), they are able to connect to their pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain from which people engage in rational thinking, decision-making, and reasoning. From within the WoT people feel psychologically safe to engage in conversation, build relationships, share opinions, and feel comfortable to disagree and have difficult conversations.

When people are in conflict, they can often feel threatened, overwhelmed, uncomfortable with the subject matter, or conflict itself. This can lead to dysregulation.

When people exceed their window of tolerance, they are dysregulated. Dysregulation can be experienced as either hyper-dysregulation or hypo-dysregulation.
Hyper-dysregulation can look like crying, screaming, yelling, ‘red face’, shaking; it can feel like looking perfectly calm on the outside but ‘seething on the inside’. Hypo-dysregulation can look like slumped shoulders, withdrawing, the body curling into itself, it can feel like suddenly becoming tired or sleepy in response to hearing something, or similarly, experiencing ‘fuzzy brain’. Hyper-dysregulation engages the fight or flight mechanisms; hypo-dysregulation engages most freeze mechanisms.²  

When we dysregulate, we cannot access our pre-frontal cortex; instead, we operate from the parts of our brain that take over when we are under threat. Fundamentally, we dysregulate when we feel psychologically unsafe.

Dysregulation can show up in the workplace as relational aggression.³ For example, ‘huffing and puffing’, eye-rolling, sabotage, diminishing and belittling others, exclusion, ‘freezing people out’, passive aggressive e-mails, flippant put-downs, or abusing a co-worker’s trust to gain social currency.

When multiple people within an organisation operate from a place of dysregulation, thereby feeling psychologically unsafe, it begets a culture of dysregulation. Each conflict subtly yet fundamentally impacts each team, which can ripple into the wider organisational culture. Further, emotional contagion often sets in, emitting relational toxicity, contributing to a toxic workplace culture in which no one feels safe.

How do We Get From Dysregulation Back into the Window of Tolerance?

A trauma-informed mediator has the tools to support dysregulated parties, co-regulating (supporting and calming) them back into their window of tolerance.  Similarly, when a trauma-informed trainer supports a team in developing conflict resolution skills, they support a team in developing self-regulation and co-regulation skills.

There are two pre-requisites required to resolve conflicts that involve dysregulation:

(1) knowledge and understanding of one’s own WoT;
and
‍(2) a culture of a relational kintsugi (repair culture).

Together, these allow parties to risk being vulnerable and feel safe admitting, ‘I dysregulated in that moment’, when discussing a conflict-event. These disclosures create the foundations for meaningful apologies and genuine relational repair.

To paraphrase and extend Dan Siegel’s work⁴ on attachment relationships: the quality of a relationship is not dictated by the severity of the rupture, but the quality of the repair. So too with organisational culture: the quality of the culture is not dictated by the rifts that occur but the extent to which relational repair is embedded as a core value.

Choosing a Relational Kintsugi Culture

Organisations have cultural choices to make: they can foster culture deliberately or allow the culture to emerge organically. Relational kintsugi offers organisations the seeds to grow psychological safety. When conflict occurs, there are two options: do nothing or attempt repair. Doing nothing risks the status quo festering into a toxic culture. When repair is the choice, it can  drive growth, innovation and organisational cohesion. Actively cultivating a ‘relational kintsugi culture’ allows your biggest asset – people, to thrive and be at their best.

References:

[1] Gallo, Amy, What Is Psychological Safety?, Harvard Business Review, February 15, 2023 [online: https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety] (last accessed June 17, 2025)

[2] These states are governed by the autonomic nervous system. ‘Fight and flight’ mechanisms are stimulated by the sympathetic nervous system, ‘freeze’ responses that are “accompanied  by flaccidity of the muscles” (see Corrigan et al, below), such as feeling physically exhausted and ‘needing to stop’ are the result of parasympathetic nervous responses. However, ‘freeze’ responses that cohere with experiences of one being ‘scared stiff’ can be the result of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems being co-activated at the same time, per: Corrigan, F M, Fisher J J, & Nutt DJ, Autonomic Dysregulation and the  Window of Tolerance Model of the Effects of Complex Emotional Trauma, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 0(00) 1-9, 2010 [online: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20093318/] (last accessed June 17, 2025)

[3] See, for example, Swit, Cara S., & Slater, Nicola M., Relational Aggression During Childhood: A Systematic Review, Aggression & Violent Behaviour, Vol. 58, May–June 2021, 101556 [online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2021.101556] (last accessed June 17, 2025)

[4] See, for example: Siegel, Daniel, The Developing Mind, 3rd ed,  London: Guilford Press 2020

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