Office coalitions: why a team splits into camps and where you fit in

“You’re with us, right?”

The question comes in the office kitchen, between two coffees, almost in passing. Your colleague doesn’t say who this “us” is against, but she doesn’t need to. For three weeks now everyone in the office has known that the head of department and the most experienced colleague fell out over a project, and for three weeks lunches, breaks and even seats at meetings have been quietly sorting themselves onto two sides. You have nothing to do with the dispute. You weren’t there, you didn’t pick a side. But in this moment you realise the dispute has already picked you.

People rarely talk openly about how a team splits into camps. They talk about a “bad atmosphere”, about “difficult people”, about “politics”. But when you look at a workplace the way we look at a family in relational family therapy — as a system in which everyone has a place and where every move by one person changes everyone else —, it becomes clear that camps are not a coincidence. They have their own geometry. And that geometry is often very similar to the one you know from home.

How quickly “us” and “them” appear

In the summer of 1954 the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues brought 22 boys, all around eleven years old, to a summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. The boys came from similar backgrounds and didn’t know each other. They were split into two groups which, during the first week, didn’t even know the other existed. Each group gave itself a name — the Eagles and the Rattlers — and developed its own habits.

When the researchers set the two groups competing for prizes, within a few days something happened that you would probably recognise from many an office. The boys began calling each other names, burned the other group’s flag and planned raids on each other’s cabins. They described their own group as brave and fair and the other as cheating. None of this came from the character of individual boys. It came from the position they had been put in.

A good fifteen years later Henri Tajfel showed that you don’t even need competition. In his experiments people were divided into groups by a completely trivial criterion — for example, which of two paintings by abstract artists they preferred — and when handing out rewards they still favoured “their own”, people they had never met. The label “us” alone is enough to tilt how we see others.

This is the first thing worth knowing about office camps: they are not proof that your team is full of bad people. They are proof that it is full of people.

A workplace is a system, not a list of individuals

When things get tangled at work, we look for someone to blame. Who started it, who is difficult, who is “stirring things up”. That is understandable, but it often misses the point. The systemic view, which marriage and family therapy also grows out of, asks something else: what is happening between people that makes each of them behave the way they do?

A family is a system in the sense that its members are connected so closely that a change in one sets off changes in all of them — you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under the family as a system. A team is not a family and shouldn’t be. But it shares some of the same features: a hierarchy, unwritten rules, roles nobody handed out yet everyone knows, and a long-term dependence you can’t simply walk away from. Where those features exist, the same patterns appear.

The most common of them are three: the triangle, the coalition and the scapegoat.

The triangle: how two people pull in a third

The psychiatrist Murray Bowen, one of the pioneers of family therapy, noticed that a relationship between two people under pressure is unstable. When the tension between them rises, one of them — or both — starts to drain it off onto a third person. A husband doesn’t talk to his wife; he complains to his mother. A mother doesn’t confront her husband; she confides in her daughter. For Bowen the triangle was the smallest stable unit of relationships: tension spreads across three corners and so becomes easier to bear. In the knowledge base we call this triangulation.

At the office the triangle is an everyday thing. A colleague who is bothered by how the manager hands out work doesn’t tell the manager — he tells you. A manager who is unhappy with that colleague doesn’t tell him — she has “just a little moan” to you over coffee. You become a container for tension that isn’t yours. In the short term this makes life easier for all three: two people avoid an unpleasant conversation, and you feel trusted and important. In the long term the relationship between the two who ought to talk never changes, because the tension always finds a way out somewhere else.

The coalition: when two join against a third

A triangle is not yet a camp. A camp forms when a triangle hardens into a coalition — a more lasting bond between two or more people formed against someone. Salvador Minuchin, who developed structural family therapy, distinguished between an alliance, in which people join together over a shared interest, and a coalition, which is held together by an opponent. The first is a healthy part of any system. The second slowly eats it away.

Coalitions that cut across the hierarchy are especially damaging. In a family, this is a father who teams up with his son against the mother, or a mother who turns her daughter into a confidante about marital problems. Jay Haley called such a bond the “perverse triangle”: two people from different levels of the hierarchy join against a third, but the bond is covert and everyone denies it. I wrote about how bonds between brothers and sisters leave a lifelong imprint in Siblings, alliances and coalitions: the invisible geometry of a family.

At work the perverse triangle has a recognisable shape. A director regularly bypasses a head of department and calls one of his team directly, asks “how things are really going” and makes decisions based on those conversations. The head of department formally keeps his position but loses his authority without knowing where it went. The team member gains power he can’t use openly. And the others on the team sense that there are two truths — the official one and the real one — and start choosing which to lean towards.

Coalitions are rarely born of malice. More often they are born of anxiety: in an uncertain environment it is easier to know who is “ours” than to bear not knowing where you stand.

The scapegoat: the one who carries the tension for everyone

The third pattern is the most painful. When tension builds up in a system and nobody can address it directly, the system often concentrates it in one person. In families this is the “problem” child, while two parents who don’t talk to each other can pour all their energy into him — I wrote about this and other roles in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?.

In a team the scapegoat is the colleague everyone else agrees about. They may disagree about everything else, but on the fact that “she’s slow” or “he always messes something up”, they meet. Paradoxically, the scapegoat holds the team together. That is why the system finds it so hard to let him go. When such a person leaves, something surprising often happens: the tension doesn’t disappear, but within a few months it finds a new carrier.

This doesn’t mean the scapegoat never did anything wrong. It means his role is bigger than his mistakes. If you are wondering whether someone on your team is a scapegoat, here is a good question to ask: would anything change if he left tomorrow — or would the team simply need someone else?

Why this feels so familiar from home

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we start from an insight that in Slovenia has been developed most fully by Christian Gostečnik: we unconsciously bring into new relationships the atmospheres and roles we grew up in. Not because we want to, but because they are familiar. The familiar feels safe, even when it hurts.

That is why it matters where you land in an office split. Someone who as a child carried messages back and forth between quarrelling parents will often be, at work, the one everyone trusts and who “mediates”. Someone who at home was the one anger was poured onto will be quicker to feel that the team sees him as the culprit — and will sometimes behave in ways that confirm it. Someone who had to be on one parent’s side so as not to lose that parent’s love will find it hard, at work, to bear being on no side at all.

This isn’t necessarily happening to you. But if you notice that in job after job you keep landing in the same place in the split, it is a hint that there is more to it than chance. You may also find this piece useful: Attachment at work: how the pattern shows with your manager and colleagues.

Where you fit in all this

When a team splits, people end up in a few typical places. None of them is “right”; each has its own cost and its own benefit.

The fourth place is the one Bowen describes with the term differentiation: the capacity to stay in contact with people without merging with their emotions. At the office this means you can have coffee with both sides, listen without nodding along, and return the messages someone loads onto you for another person to where they belong. It isn’t neutrality in the sense of indifference. It is a stance in which you care about people, not about one camp winning.

This position isn’t free. Camps often experience someone who isn’t with them as unreliable. In the first weeks one or both sides may push you away a little. But people who can stand in this place are, in the long run, the ones the team turns to when a conflict really needs resolving.

A conversation worth hearing

What does this sound like in practice? The kitchen conversation from the beginning might go like this (composed, not a real person):

“You’re with us, right? You’ve seen how Mojca behaves in meetings.”
“I can see you and Mojca are both very angry. What actually happened on the project, I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. You know what she’s like.”
“I know what she’s like with me. Not with the two of you. Has she ever told you what made her so angry?”
Silence. “No. She doesn’t even talk to me any more.”
“Maybe that’s what needs to happen. Not with me — with her.”

There is no magic sentence that heals a split. But three important things happen in this conversation. First, your colleague hears that you notice her anger and take it seriously. Then she hears that you won’t adopt her version of the world. And finally, the conversation returns to the only place where something can change: the relationship between the two people in conflict.

A response like this takes some inner calm. If you get stuck on it, you may find this piece helpful: Assertiveness: how to say what you want without aggression or apology.

Exercise: draw a map of your team

This exercise takes about a quarter of an hour. You need a sheet of paper and a bit of quiet. It isn’t about judging anyone, but about seeing what is happening to you.

1. Draw the people. Write down the names of the people you work with most often — including yourself and your manager. Place them so that those who are closer in real life are closer on the page.
2. Mark the connections. Draw a solid line between people who get on well. A zigzag line between those in tension. A dashed line between those who don’t talk. Don’t think too long — your first impression is enough.
3. Look for triangles. Where do two people who are in tension both talk to a third? Who is that third person? Is it, perhaps, often you?
4. See where you are. Which of the four positions do you hold: in a camp, the go-between, the scapegoat, connected but not caught? Does this place feel familiar from somewhere else — a previous job, your family?
5. Choose one small shift. Not the whole team. One single relationship in which you will do something differently this week — for example, the next time someone complains about a third person, ask: “Have you told him?”

If you like drawing, the exercise may feel familiar: something similar is done in therapy with a genogram, only there it is about the family. If you would like to explore how these patterns show up in your family of origin, there is a longer session for exactly that, A Look into the Past.

As you draw, you may notice that your team is less divided than it seemed, or more. Both are valuable. What matters most is that a pattern which used to be just an unpleasant feeling becomes a picture you can look at from the outside.

Where this view falls short

The systemic view is powerful, but it isn’t the answer to everything. I want to be precise here.

Not every camp comes from anxiety. Sometimes people band together because they are facing real injustice — because a manager systematically rewards some and overlooks others, because the rules are different for one person than for another. Then the group isn’t a “symptom of the system” but a reasonable response to it. Asking people to be “above it all” would mean asking them to bear injustice quietly.

Not every scapegoat is just a role. Someone may really do poor work, harm others or break agreements. The systemic view doesn’t mean nobody is responsible. It only means that alongside an individual’s responsibility, we also look at what the system is doing with that person.

When it is more than a split. If a camp is directed against you, if exclusion, mockery or sabotage of your work drags on for months and systematically, this is no longer office politics — it may be workplace harassment. I explained how to tell one from the other in Workplace bullying or just a difficult relationship? How to tell them apart and what you can do about each. In that case don’t stay on your own: write down what happens, seek support from a trade union or legal aid, and in Slovenia the Labour Inspectorate is responsible for overseeing employers. I don’t give legal advice here — talk to an employment law specialist about your rights.

When the answer lies elsewhere. Sometimes a team is divided so deeply and management is so uninterested that no personal shift will be enough. Then leaving can be a healthy decision, not a defeat. A system that needs a scapegoat will find one. It doesn’t have to be you.

If your team has no open camps, but everything is quiet and nobody speaks up about the things that matter, you may relate more to A team where nobody speaks: silence as a rule and what it hides.

What to remember

• Camps form quickly and among perfectly ordinary people — Sherif’s summer camp with 22 boys showed this within days.
• A workplace isn’t a family, but as a system it knows the same patterns: triangles, coalitions and the scapegoat.
• The most damaging are covert coalitions that cut across the hierarchy — when someone at the top bypasses a manager and teams up with one of their staff.
• The place you take in a split is often familiar from your family of origin. That isn’t a verdict, it’s a hint.
• The healthiest position is to be connected but not caught: you talk to both sides and return messages to where they belong.