EMQ » January–March 2018 » Vol. 54 Issue 1
by Jeff Singfiel
The team meeting did not end well. Something just felt off as everyone dropped their laptops into their bags, put their notebooks away, and set their empty coffee cups into the sink. The seven-member church-planting team normally met every few weeks. However, as the national holiday approached, meetings were more frequent. The team was trying to nail down the details for an upcoming outreach event at the local theater. Everyone had been excited and felt God’s leading on the project, at least at first. It had seemed so obvious when Ross first proposed the idea several weeks ago. But then again, Ross was always great on ideas but less so on execution. Today, after the opening prayer and devotional, the meeting started off well enough, but then people started rubbing each other the wrong way.
First, Ross and Matt bug each other. Ross’s wife, Kerrie, has an outstanding worship ministry that serves to develop local Christian musicians; Matt does not give her enough credit. Of course, Matt feels like Ross is overly sensitive. Kerrie was coordinating the musicians for the outreach, but now she reported scheduling problems with the nationals. Matt got a little testy and said she should have started planning earlier. Ross and Kerrie’s well-known worship ministry gave them a pretty high profile with supporters back home. That has generated a lot of interest, prayer, and funds, but it also created some envy.
Tricia and Tifni were coordinating the after-event refreshments. They could not settle on how many 2-liter bottles of soda to get or whether they should go with peanuts and pretzels or several large cakes. Tricia argued that salty snacks were easier to serve and that they could use the extras in the small group ministry. Tifni, on the other hand, thought that bakery cakes sent a better message to the community about the special nature of the occasion.
Peter, the team leader, and his wife Pam were handling the children’s program for the outreach event. The problem was space. The main hall, of course, would be used for the adult event, but there was another large room available for the children. The problem was, Kerrie said that she and the worship group needed to use that room for rehearsal and later as an impromptu green room during the event. They had difficulty working through who could use what when. Each thought their ministry needed that resource.
It does not take long to realize that working on a missionary team is often harder than it appears. This difficulty often feels wrong somehow since teammates love the Lord and presumably love both one another and the people they are trying to serve. In part, this disparity between fantasy and reality is because teams are far more complex than we want to believe. Most of us have worked on teams of different types long before we ever arrived on the mission field. We have participated on sports teams, academic teams, worship teams, or work teams. “Team” has become an all-encompassing term to describe a group of people who share a common purpose (most of the time), who have complimentary skills and depend on one another to carry out tasks and meet their needs.
This article suggests another way to look at teams and another way to look at team conflict. First, we have to acknowledge that our predominant and unconscious models of teams, often informed by our personal history, spiritually- and psychologically-informed thinking, are inadequate. Second, the discipline of organizational behavior offers a helpful model for thinking about our teams. Third, given that model, we can manage conflict better when we understand the three different kinds of conflict within a group: relational, task, and process. Each type of conflict is caused by different things, looks different, and is managed differently. In the end, we will see why teams are so challenging, how conflict works, and why we need so much grace with one another.
Seeing our Teams with New Lenses
Many of us in ministry look at our teams primarily through a couple of sets of lenses. There is nothing wrong with these lenses. These lenses, like all lenses, sharpen our focus on some elements of team life but blur our perception of others. The challenge is not the lens that we use, but an over-reliance on one lens when another may also help us better understand what we are seeing.
The first set of lenses we use when thinking about teams come from our personal history or contemporary culture. We import our experiences with our football or track teams, our debate club, or our old church worship team into our missionary teams. We carry our expectations from those experiences with us. However, your missionary team is not like any of these. The purpose is different. The skills are different. The motivation is different. In fact, almost everything is different. Importing your previous experience, models, and metaphors into your missionary team is a recipe for disillusionment and misunderstanding.
The second set of lenses which predominate on ministry teams might be called spiritual lenses. Note that these are not “biblical lenses” or even a “theological lens” per se, though we derive them from Scripture. Our spiritual lens only lets us see our teams from the perspective of spirituality. When conflict emerges, we tend to perceive spiritual causes that we can only resolve with spiritual solutions. The problem is that not all conflict is the result of defective spirituality. Statements like that tend to run across the grain of those of us in ministry. We have many years of training, and many years of experience, in seeing the world through a lens of spirituality. When there is a breakdown between a group of people, our natural reflex is to relate what we see to the fruit of the Spirit, to attribute guilt and innocence, or define all behavior as a matter of sin or holiness. These can all be real factors within group conflict, but they are not necessarily the only factors at play.
The third set of lenses through which we view our teams might be called psychological lenses. Evangelicals began a slow embrace of the social sciences, particularly psychology, in the latter half of the twentieth century (Johnson and Jones 2000). Most college graduates, whether from a private Christian or state institution, have had at least an introductory course in psychology. We learned about people like Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. We may have studied counseling. Our niche in our organization may be member care. When we look at our teammates, we may consider Piaget and learning theory, or Kohlberg and moral development. Our teammates have issues and we consider the biblical counseling course we had in school. This set of lenses is also helpful, but they are also limited.
These spiritual and the psychological sets of lenses, each tend to see the individual in isolation from the broader context of which he or she is a part. These lenses almost always force us into thinking about me versus him, her or them. Both sets of lenses tend to reduce group dynamics down to sinful/holy, fleshly/sanctified, and sick/well. The teams on which we serve are far more complex than that. Again, these latter two sets of lenses are good. They can contribute to team health, but the modern missionary team needs another set of tools.
Teams as Complex Systems
Our model has to be as robust and as flexible as the teams on which we serve. Much of today’s literature on teams, let alone team conflict, does not really scratch where missionaries itch. That is partly because much of it came out of research on groups that are very different from most missionary teams.
Take, for instance, the classic four-step model of group development: forming, storming, norming, and performing which was originally articulated by Bruce Tuckman in 1965. A group first goes through a process of forming as people join and begin to get to know each other. They learn what the ministry looks like, how their needs will be met, and whether they can trust each other. These dynamics lead to storming, increased intragroup conflict as members negotiate who does what, decide both on how to communicate and what rules to follow. Then a group settles into a set of patterns of behavior in the norming stage before getting down to performing: working together well as a team. Then, one couple leaves on home assignment, a single mid-term worker joins your team, and you are hosting a short-term group from a supporting church. Now, what happens to the process? This four-step model has been hugely influential across the team literature. Unfortunately, it does not go nearly far enough; teams are more complex than that. They rarely develop in a linear, step-by-step fashion.
Over the last twenty years, researchers have begun using a theory of systems to explain human groups. All groups, including missionary teams, are complex systems. That means a team is made up of several parts and processes that interact in various ways to fulfill members’ needs and accomplish tasks. A textbook definition of a group is a “complex, adaptive, dynamic, coordinated, and bounded set of patterned relationships between members, tools, and tasks” (Arrow, McGrath, and Berdahl 2000, 34).
Imagine a triangle: that is your group. It consists of three main parts, or networks, and the relationships that connect them. The first main component, or network, is the members. This comes as no great surprise. What may come as a surprise is that there is more to a team than simply the relationship between the members. The relationships between Ross, Matt, Tricia, Tifni and the others do not exist in isolation. The second point on the triangle is the network of “tools.” The tools network is all the ideas, philosophies, theologies, and resources that enable you to take your time, talents, and treasure to plant churches, make disciples, do business-as-mission, or whatever you do. Budgets and “philosophies of ministry” are also part of the “toolbox.” They are separate from the group members because they exert influences on the team that are different from the relationships. Matt may believe strongly in saturation church planting or orality ministry. However, these approaches are not Matt; they are part of the “tool network.” The third point of the triangle is the network of tasks that the group consciously or unconsciously wants to accomplish. Here too, the tasks are not the group, but they exert pressure and influence on the group, on the environment, and on the organization and vice versa. The outreach event is a task that is made up of many, many smaller tasks, like purchasing pretzels or cakes. The various tasks a group is involved in almost always involve some other complex system like a bakery, a grocery store, or an A/V company.
That is why there is more to the model than just a triangle of members, tools, and tasks. First, we have to consider that the members of our team are themselves complex systems made up of other spiritual, biological, psychological, and social systems. The members of your team are also members of other complex systems like their families, both on the field and at home. Second, as we look out, we have to consider the other systems in which the missionary team “triangle” is embedded. Most obviously, the team is usually embedded in a larger, parent organizational system. That organization is a much bigger complex system made up of many, many other systems like other teams, regional structures, finance departments, human resources, member care, and so on. Perhaps less obviously, each member of the team also connects with a network of supporters who are themselves parts of complex networks, like their local churches. Locally, the missionary team is also often embedded in a national church system of some sort as well as the cultural, legal, and economic systems each of which exerts an influence on the team, and vice versa.
There is a lot more than meets the eye to our church-planting team. While Ross and Matt frustrate each other, Ross does not realize that Matt’s relationship with his wife is struggling. That is part of his (and her) psychological, spiritual and relational systems. Peter, the team leader, is being quietly pressured by the organization to produce results. Kerrie is working with national musicians who are members of a national church or churches, another separate network. The sound equipment used for the event may come from another vendor, yet another complex system. This broad constellation of intertwining complex networks looks messy . . . and it is. The complexity of missionary teams is what makes conflict so insidious, and so important to understand. Moreover, each component of our triangle model is susceptible to its own kinds of conflicts.
Intrapersonal Conflict on Teams
Unfortunately, our spiritual and psychological mental models tend to point us to conflict as a relational disagreement between two people. Research shows, however, that there are at least three types of conflict that exist in groups: relational, task, and process (Jehn 1997). These three types of conflict may look the same, or even feel the same, but they emerge for different reasons and have different consequences. They closely track the member, task, and tool networks of our team triangle presented above.
Relational conflict is the type with which we are most familiar. Relational conflict occurs between people about values, personalities, and compatibilities. We feel relational conflict on an emotional level. In the opening story, Ross and Matt are experiencing relational conflict. Ross feels like Matt does not value his wife’s worship ministry highly enough. We experience these conflicts with keenly felt, and usually negative, emotion. The emotional power of relational conflict is so great that they distract the team from their tasks and goals (Greer, Jehn, and Mannix 2008). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the amount of relational conflict is the greatest predictor of how well teams work, how committed people are to their teams, and how satisfied they are with their teams (Behfar, Mannix, Peterson, and Trochim 2010). Research also shows that relational conflict does not emerge all by itself. In fact, relational conflict is often a product of other kinds of team conflict which is not adequately managed. Remember that relational conflict is often the product of other conflicts that have been ignored for too long.
Highly diverse teams are more prone to relational conflict (Ayub and Jehn 2006) as are teams that are built with pre-existing faultlines like large differences in experience, training, or language ability (Bezrukova, Thatcher, and Jehn 2007). Teams that lack clarity on what their task is and how they should accomplish it are also prone to relational conflict. While the conflict between Ross and Matt has now become emotional, it likely started because inadequate attention to how Kerrie’s worship ministry fit into the mission and strategy of the team.
Task conflict is the second major type of conflict experienced on teams. People in task conflict have different opinions about a task, job or project. Task conflicts usually emerge about how a task should best be completed. Tricia and Tifni are in task conflict about the after-event refreshments. How to do a job like host refreshments, or how much of a resource is required (soda) or what kind of a resource (pretzels or cake) are all typical of task conflicts. People in task conflict are usually thinking about the differences rather than feeling them, as in relational conflict. Tricia and Tifni will no doubt argue about how many 2-liters of soda were used at the last event and summon up their knowledge of the culture as relates to pretzels versus cakes. Left unattended, task conflict can easily grow into relational conflict, but it does not start out that way.
The last type of conflict is process conflict. Process conflict is the often unspoken or overlooked aspect of conflict on a team. When people disagree about what order something they should do something, how they should allocate budgets, how theology and event planning interact, and feel tension over philosophy of ministry issues, they are engaged in process conflict. Peter and Pam are experiencing a process conflict as they plan the children’s ministry aspect of the outreach. They are not (yet) in relational conflict with Kerrie about the use of the extra, large room. They are not in task conflict with each other about how the children’s component of the evening should unfold. They are in conflict about how a resource (the extra, large room) should be best utilized for the overall project. Process conflict relates to the resources, tools, philosophies, and theologies that a person brings to the group. Process conflict has profound implications for the formation and viability of a missionary team. First of all, research shows that groups who experience high levels of process conflict early in their formation experience long-lasting and negative effects down the road (Greer, Jehn, and Mannix 2008). Second, process conflict also has a negative impact on the way groups perform together. When organizational or national church leadership asserts its will, it usually initially generates process conflict, not relational conflict. These dynamics are why purely spiritualistic approaches are not always adequate.
Our model demonstrates that teams are complex systems made up of members, tools, and tasks which are embedded in, or connect to, other complex structures. Because of this, conflict emerges in three primary ways: relational, process, and task. Understanding this is one of the keys to maintain healthy teams for the long term.
Conclusion
The outreach event went well. No one who attended knew about all the team’s struggles. Ross and Matt still bug each other. Their initial process conflict over the worship ministry’s place on the team has grown into relational conflict that is often harder do deal with. Kerrie’s worship team and the children’s ministry team decided that the kids had a higher strategic priority than rehearsal and a mid-event green room. After discussing what had worked well in the past, Tricia and Tifni decided to try cakes at this event and carefully track the budget numbers against previous events.
Missionary teams are surprisingly complex systems. That complexity makes understanding team conflict difficult. One thing is certain: we need to use a variety of lenses in looking at how teams operate. The psychological and spiritual lenses will probably be very helpful as Ross and Matt try to work together, and especially for Matt’s struggling marriage. Yet, other lenses from the social sciences can help us understand why conflict is occurring and what to do about it. These other lenses help us focus on the complete picture.
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Jeff Singfiel has been in ministry for 24 years including ten years of pastoral ministry in the US and fourteen years in the Balkans with a denominational missions organization. He has worked in a variety of field organizational structures doing church planting in a majority Muslim country.
References
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