Two colleagues share a desk cluster. They have worked in the same Barcelona office for eight months. They have been to the same team lunches, attended the same meetings, sat through the same all-hands. And yet something between them doesn’t work. Small irritations accumulate. Emails go unanswered for what feels like too long. Feedback given is received badly. Deadlines are treated differently.

Both attribute it to personality. “We just don’t have great chemistry.” Neither of them considers that they are operating from different cultural frameworks for what work looks like — and that proximity, rather than resolving those differences, is actually making them more visible and more loaded.

This is the specific challenge of conflict in co-located teams: when you’re in different countries, cultural difference feels like a reasonable explanation for friction. When you’re in the same room, it feels like a personal failing. The cultural friction is the same. The diagnosis is completely different — and the wrong diagnosis produces the wrong intervention. For the broader framework on how cultural friction operates in international teams, see the article on leading multicultural teams.

Why Proximity Makes Cultural Friction Worse, Not Better

There is a common assumption that if you put people from different cultural backgrounds in the same physical space, cultural friction will reduce over time. Shared experience will create shared understanding. People will adapt to each other naturally.

This is sometimes true. It is also sometimes exactly wrong. Proximity increases the frequency of cultural interaction — which means more opportunities for misreading, not fewer. And in a co-located environment, those misreadings do not stay contained to specific interactions. They build a narrative. “She’s always like this.” “He never takes things seriously.”

The Four Flashpoints in Co-Located International Teams

Deadlines and time. In monochronic cultures — Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the UK — deadlines are firm commitments and punctuality is a signal of respect. In polychronic cultures — Latin America, the Middle East, much of Southern Europe — time is more fluid, and relationships and context can legitimately take priority over schedule. When these two orientations share an office, what one person experiences as reliability the other experiences as rigidity. For a deeper look, the article on time across cultures covers it in full.

Meetings and participation. Cultural differences in how people contribute to meetings — who speaks when, how disagreement is expressed, whether silence signals agreement or reservation — produce friction that is particularly visible in co-located settings where people can see each other’s reactions in real time. The person who dominates every discussion doesn’t see themselves as dominating. The person who says nothing doesn’t see themselves as disengaged.

Feedback and directness. Direct feedback cultures and indirect feedback cultures produce some of the most loaded interpersonal conflict in co-located teams — because the feedback happens in person, in real time, and the reaction to it is immediately visible. A direct critique delivered in a shared office can feel like a public event to someone from an indirect culture, even when it is intended privately. The article on direct and indirect feedback covers the mechanism and practical fixes.

Hierarchy and authority. In high power distance cultures, who speaks first, who defers to whom, and how authority is expressed matters enormously. In low power distance cultures, the casual, first-name, everyone-contributes atmosphere feels natural. In the same office, the person from a high power distance culture who is visibly deferential may be read as weak. The person from a low power distance culture who challenges a senior colleague openly may be read as disrespectful. See the companion articles on egalitarian leadership and hierarchical leadership for the full picture.

What Leaders Can Do

For leaders managing ongoing tension in co-located multicultural teams, cross-cultural advisory, coaching, and mentoring provides the sustained support to diagnose what is actually happening and build the structures that allow the team to work well.