Anchored Personalization in Managing Goal Conflict between Professional Groups: The Case of US Army Mental Health Care

Organizational life is rife with conflict between groups that pursue different goals, particularly when groups have strong commitments to professional identities developed outside the organization. I use data from a 30-month comparative ethnographic field study of four U.S. Army combat brigades to examine conflict between commanders who had a goal of fielding a mission-ready force and mental health providers who had a goal of providing rehabilitative mental health care to soldiers. All commanders and providers faced goal and identity conflict and had access to similar integrative mechanisms. Yet only those associated with two brigades addressed these conflicts in ways that accomplished the army's superordinate goal of having both mission-ready and mentally healthy soldiers. Both successful brigades used what I call "anchored personalization" practices, which included developing personalized relations across groups, anchoring members in their home group identity, and co-constructing integrative solutions to conflict. These practices were supported by an organizational structure in which professionals were assigned to work with specific members of the other group, while remaining embedded within their home group. In contrast, an organizational structure promoting only anchoring in one's home group identity led to failure when each group pursued its own goals at the expense of the other group's goals. A structure promoting only personalization across groups without anchoring in one's home group identity led to failure from cooptation by the dominant group. This study contributes to our understanding of how groups with strong professional identities can work together in service of their organization's superordinate goals when traditional mechanisms fail.