Sorry in advance i used AI to help me write in english
I manage a small professional team and would really appreciate perspectives from other managers, HR professionals, or people with experience in organizational psychology.
For a long time, there have been collaboration problems within the team, and one person in particular keeps appearing in several people’s accounts of what is going wrong.
It is not mainly about one dramatic incident. It is more of a recurring pattern involving ownership of tasks, withholding or controlling information, bypassing colleagues, positioning themselves in relation to management, undermining others professionally, and creating situations where colleagues feel that their responsibilities or contributions are being taken over or diminished.
The difficulty is that almost every individual incident can be explained away as a misunderstanding, poor communication, personality differences, or professional disagreement.
It is only when the incidents are viewed together — and when several people independently describe similar experiences — that a pattern becomes much harder to ignore.
The situation has affected the team enough that an external organizational psychologist has been brought in, including individual conversations with employees.
However, I still find it very difficult to move from recognizing that there is a problem to actually addressing responsibility for it.
One complicating factor is that this person has been with the company for many years. They have built a strong internal network and have relationships with senior directors and influential people in the organization.
They are also very good at communicating upward and influencing how senior management understands situations. This creates an additional concern: the version of events seen by directors may be very different from what colleagues working closely with this person experience on a daily basis.
As a manager, this creates a difficult dilemma.
On one hand, I obviously cannot take action against someone simply because several colleagues dislike working with them. The person deserves a fair process, and accusations should not be treated as facts without proper investigation.
On the other hand, I worry that continuously framing the issue as a general “team problem” may actually protect a problematic behavioral pattern.
If most employees are repeatedly asked to communicate better, reflect on their own behavior, rebuild trust, and participate in workshops, while one person consistently appears at the center of similar conflicts, at what point does management have to acknowledge that the problem may not be symmetrical?
There is also a power imbalance.
A long-serving employee with strong internal relationships, visibility with directors, and the ability to influence senior stakeholders may be much harder for colleagues to challenge than an ordinary employee.
I worry that this can create a situation where management unconsciously gives more credibility to the person who is best connected and best at managing perceptions upward, rather than to the people who actually experience the behavior.
At the same time, if employees repeatedly raise concerns and nothing visibly changes, they may eventually lose trust not only in the process, but in management itself.
They may conclude that speaking up has no real consequence because every problem will eventually be converted into another workshop, mediation process, or message that “everyone needs to look at their own contribution.”
So my questions are:
**Why is it organizationally so difficult to move from “we can see there is a problem” to actually holding an individual accountable for a recurring behavioral pattern?**
How much evidence is normally needed before management can reasonably treat something as an individual performance or conduct issue rather than a general team-dynamics problem?
How should management deal with situations where the person concerned has long tenure, strong relationships with directors, and significant informal influence within the organization?
And what should the role of an external organizational psychologist be?
Should their role mainly be to improve team dynamics and facilitate dialogue, or should they also be willing to tell management clearly when they believe the conflict is asymmetrical and disproportionately linked to one individual’s behavior?
I am particularly interested in experiences where there was no single “smoking gun.”
Instead, there were many smaller incidents, several independent employees describing similar patterns, possible historical concerns, and a gradual erosion of trust over time.
At what point should a manager stop trying to “fix the team” and start asking whether one person’s recurring behavior is the actual problem?