Have you ever watched a colleague go quiet after a meeting, or push back hard on something that seemed minor? It's tempting to read that as an overreaction, or to out it down to personality. But often something else is going on — and understanding it can change how we respond to conflict at work.
The SCARF Model
Dr. David Rock, a neuroscientist and author, developed a framework called SCARF to describe five things people tend to care about deeply in social and professional settings: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. The model draws on research suggesting that social threats and rewards can activate some of the same brain circuitry as physical threats and rewards — which may help explain why a seemingly small workplace moment can trigger a reaction that feels out of proportion to the trigger itself.
What This Can Look Like in Practice
Each of the five pillars can be affected by different kinds of workplace moments:
- Status — being corrected or criticised in front of others
- Certainty — a reorganisation or change announced with little explanation
- Autonomy — being left out of a decision that affects your own work
- Relatedness — feeling excluded from a team or its dynamics
- Fairness — a process or decision that seems to favour one person over another
None of these reactions are irrational. They may simply be a response to a deeper need being unmet — often one the person themselves hasn't fully named.
The Connection to Conflict
This is part of why workplace conflict can be so difficult to resolve by addressing only the surface disagreement. Two colleagues arguing about a deadline, a process, or an email might really be responding to something underneath — a threat to their sense of fairness, or a loss of autonomy. If that underlying need goes unaddressed, the same tension can resurface later, even after the original issue is "resolved."
Where Conflict Coaching Comes In
Rather than starting from each person's stated position, conflict coaching moves toward the interests and needs beneath it — helping someone identify which of the SCARF pillars might be at play for them, and helping them consider what might be happening for the other person too. That shift — from arguing a position to understanding a need — is often what allows a genuine resolution to take hold, rather than a temporary truce.