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Sure, they may notice changes at the office. Maybe one employee suddenly begins to dominate the conversation at meetings, or people are interrupting each other more often, forming cliques or ignoring someone’s comments. It would never dawn on them, though, that their beneficent acts precipitated the changes.

But that is exactly what has happened: Research reveals that the kindnesses to individual employees often unsettle the existing status order and lead to conflicts as the group tries to sort it out.

The answer, obviously, isn’t that managers should stop rewarding employees. But it’s crucial that managers recognize when they’re upsetting what might be called the status status quo, and be able to minimize the damage their acts can cause.

Few managers, of course, think about any of this when making decisions. That’s partly because the actual status hierarchy in the workplace often doesn’t follow the formal hierarchy of the organization. Status is socially conferred and is typically an unspoken consensual agreement over the relative amount of respect, esteem and regard employees have for one another. Upsetting that agreement often affects the relative standing of everyone in the group. As in a game of Jenga, moving one piece can topple the entire tower.

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Such status conflict is more detrimental to group performance than other forms of conflict. A study by professors Corinne Bendersky and Nicholas Hays of the University California, Los Angeles, and Michigan State University followed 374 M.B.A. and executive M.B.A. students who were collaborating in 68 teams as part of their training.

They tracked interactions and noted when different forms of conflict—conflict over tasks, work processes, interpersonal struggles and status—emerged. Status conflict took many forms, including team members invoking their educational pedigree, devaluing another person’s contributions to the team, and accentuating their own contribution. When the researchers looked at which teams performed the worst on a series of tasks it was the teams that most frequently had struggles over status.

I first encountered status conflict when I was studying an effort by a large health-care organization to improve patient care. The effort increased the status and responsibility of nurses, though it didn’t formally change the nurse’s role. The nurse was still a nurse.

As part of the rollout, hundreds of nurses, doctors and medical assistants wore sensors, allowing me and Ingrid Nembhard, an associate professor at Wharton, to track the frequency and duration of interactions within teams, as well as the team’s conversational characteristics on a second-by-second basis.

What we found surprised us. Rather than translating into higher performance for the health-care teams, the change in the nurses’ status created discord within the teams. Everyone on the team started interrupting each other more frequently. The wearable sensors showed that they stopped listening to one another. Nurses and physicians simply stopped talking to one another. And yet none of the teams recognized the cause of the increased strife.

With the evidence from the wearable sensors, the organization successfully relaunched the program with additional interventions to improve nurses’ relationships with the care team and support their leadership role.

If teams don’t know they are engaged in a conflict over status, how can managers identify and avoid status conflict? Managers, after all, want to reward employees who are doing well, or may want to give certain people—such as in the nurses’ example—more responsibilities in an effort to improve performance.

The key is to do it in a way that achieves the desired result, without setting off a status-battle backlash.

For one thing, managers need to look for subtle signs that people on teams may be struggling to figure out their status ordering. Increases in nonverbal aggression, such as frequent interruption, individuals dominating conversations, interpersonal antagonism and disengagement, can be telltale clues. Managers may also notice cliques forming as people who feel like they’ve been slighted attempt to increase their sense of self by creating coalitions.

So what can a manager who notices this do? Generally, there are two approaches to conflict: either trying to reduce differences between team members or trying to increase tolerance of differences. The first approach works with many types of interpersonal conflicts. But not with status battles. With those, trying to resolve it by reducing differences, giving everyone equal voice or negotiating is likely to backfire and lead to even more conflicts over who does what job.

A much better approach is to try to get teams to recognize the necessity of status differences and increase their tolerance of them by creating transparency in how rewards are allocated and affirming the value that other team members bring to the team by frequently recalling past successes or highlighting what they bring to the team.

But the most important thing managers can do is to head off status conflicts in the first place. In cases where a manager wants to recognize one individual from a longstanding team, for instance, managers should get buy-in from the group and rely on peer-to-peer recognition systems, which allow all members of the team to recognize their colleagues for their contributions.

Even if the boss promoted someone who didn’t receive such accolades from his or her peers, the simple acknowledgment of the worker’s contributions would go a long way toward damping the status conflict. Much of the time people simply want to be recognized and employees want to be heard.

When considering who to move to the corner office or to receive a public award, managers also should be careful not to rely on personality as a proxy for proficiency. Often, extroverts are prematurely given elevated status since their gregariousness and social fluidity are associated with competence. Research by Prof. Cameron Anderson and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that over time, extroverts tend to lose status since there is a disconnect between expectations and performance.

In contrast, people who seem anxious and withdrawn tend to increase in status as their unrealized talents become apparent. A misallocation early on based on personality, rather than performance, makes it more likely that teams will have to grapple with status conflict later when the disconnect between performance expectations and status becomes clear.

Greater gender diversity on teams can also help. A recent study led by Hun Whee Lee of Michigan State University found that teams embroiled in status conflict are less creative because team members do not feel safe to speak up or share new ideas. However, the researchers found that gender diversity substantially reduced the size of this effect by increasing psychological safety in teams. When teams appear stuck in status conflict, managers may want to consider balancing teams with an uneven gender composition.

It should be said that disputes over respect and standing in the group aren’t always a bad thing. In newly formed teams, status conflict actually improves team performance by helping members clarify the hierarchy.

Conversely, status conflict is most detrimental in teams of people who have a high level of familiarity with each other. In the case of the nurses we studied, bringing in someone from the outside and providing him or her with a differentiated formal title would have been less likely to disrupt the current status ordering within the well-established team.

Finally, beware of too much of a good thing. Given the opportunity, most managers would be thrilled to have the chance to create a dream team full of high-status stars. But research by Boris Groysberg and Jeffery Polzer of Harvard Business School along with Hillary Anger Elfenbein at Washington University found that having too many high-status members on a team can lead to decreased performance because of status conflict, as the team members become absorbed in sorting out who has the highest status.

Dr. King is a professor at the Yale School of Management. Email reports@wsj.com.