Imagine that you work at a local retail store and you’ve been promoted to store manager. As part of your new role, you will have to manage staff members who are working as individual contributors at the store. In this new role, you’ll be managing several close friends who you used to work alongside as regular staff. That’s where things might get complicated: as manager, you’ll have to evaluate staff members’ performance, and how can you give a good friend a poor performance review and still remain friends?

Role conflict arises in a group whenever expectations for a member’s behavior are incompatible (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996). Role conflict can make group communication profoundly challenging. For the manager who must evaluate a friend—especially a friend whose performance could be better—there is rarely a perfect option. You might give candid constructive feedback to your friend on his performance while trying to constrain the damage to your friendship by saying something like “I hope you know I’m offering this feedback as a way to help you improve. As your friend and manager, I want to see you do well here.” A less ethical approach, of course, would be to defer to your friend’s feelings instead of to your responsibility as manager—essentially, to spare his feelings by giving him a better review than he deserves.