In most organizations, conflict that looks interpersonal is structural. The pattern recurs reliably enough that it is worth treating as a diagnostic rule rather than an occasional exception: when the same conflict between the same people keeps happening, the first question to ask is not what is wrong with the individuals but what is unclear about the structure they are operating inside.
Role ambiguity is the most common structural generator of interpersonal conflict. When two people are not clear about where one person's authority ends and the other's begins, they will come into conflict repeatedly over decisions — not because they are difficult personalities, but because the boundary was never drawn, or was drawn on paper in a way that doesn't match how things actually work. The conflict is performing a structural function: it is trying to establish the boundary that the formal structure left undefined.
Shadow roles are a related phenomenon. In most organizations past a certain age, there are people who carry informal authority that is not reflected in their formal title. The person who has been there the longest. The person who has the senior partner's ear. The person whose approval is sought before decisions are formally made, even though they are not formally in the decision. These shadow roles are not pathological in themselves — they reflect real expertise and real relational capital. The problem arises when the informal authority structure and the formal one diverge enough that people cannot predict who actually decides things, and when the shadow roles carry enough power to undermine formal decisions after the fact.
The question of who really decides is rarely comfortable to address directly, because naming it threatens people whose authority derives from the informal structure rather than the formal one. But the discomfort of naming it is almost always preferable to the ongoing cost of operating inside ambiguity — the duplicated effort, the decisions that need to be re-litigated, the talent that leaves because they cannot figure out how to function effectively in the environment.
This kind of structural clarification is less glamorous than leadership development. But it often produces more change, more quickly, than any amount of work on the individuals inside the structure — because changing what the structure requires of people changes what they do, without requiring anyone to become a different kind of person.