"If you're sincere, praise is effective.

If you're insincere, it's manipulative."

  Zig Ziglar

The five common approaches to managing conflicts are as follows:

1. Withdrawl - avoiding the conflict.
2. Smoothing - attempting to minimize the severity of the conflict.
3. Compromising - each side gives in, at least a little, to reach an agreement
4. Forcing - using power to push one parties resolution to the conflict.
5. Collaboration - a win-win, problem-solving approach of confronting the issue together.

B.W. Tuckman defined four stages of team development:

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing

The PMBOK adds a 5th stage called adjourning.

Douglas McGregor defined management approaches as falling into either X or Y styles. Theory X is defined as managers who distrust employees. Theory Y is defined as managers who trust employees.

Source: Managing the Project Team, Volume Three, by Vigay K. Verma.

"If you are trying to recover a failing project, take the following step... Hand out a piece of paper to each team member and ask them to spend five minutes writing what project they are working on. You'll likely get very different answers from each person. Commonality of goals is the number one project success criteria."

   - Andy Thomas, on Leading Complex Projects

From a project management viewpoint, there are three general types of organizations:

1. Functional
2. Matrix
3. Projectized

The matrix is the most common and complicated for project managers. It complicates team development because team members are accountable to both their functional manager and potentially multiple project managers.