  Despite the well-documented benefits of working in teams, teamwork also
results in communication, coordination and management costs, and may lead to
personal conflict between team members. In a context where teams play an
increasingly important role, it is of major importance to understand conflict
and to develop diagnostic tools to avert it. Here, we investigate empirically
whether it is possible to quantitatively predict future conflict in small teams
using parameter-free models of social network structure. We analyze data of
conflict appearance and resolution between 86 team members in 16 small teams,
all working in a real project for nine consecutive months. We find that
group-based models of complex networks successfully anticipate conflict in
small teams whereas micro-based models of structural balance, which have been
traditionally used to model conflict, do not.
