According to a 2013 study on conflicts in self-managed teams by Johnson and colleagues, the conflict can be resolved through personnel changes, process changes, or structural changes (Johnson, Hollenbeck, DeRue, Barnes, Jundt, 2013). Personnel changes refer to the removal of lower-performing team members from the team. However, if both team members are vital to performance, as in the case of Mark and Nicole, it is not a good solution (Johnson et al, 2013). In the HBR case study, Mark showed to be a worse performer than Nicole by failing to deliver necessary materials and think outside the box to gain vital information. In contrary, Mark possesses key connections to the targeted firm - friendship with Ian, therefore removing him from the team might sever the ties between CliffBank and Millhouse, and thus serve as a deal-breaker during the negotiations. In addition, the team needs to perform an analysis in order to identify the true source of the conflict. Johnson et al (2013) point out that most self-managed teams misdiagnose the cause of conflict as either personnel or process-based. However, the true source of the conflict might be structural. By focusing on structural changes to resolve the existing dysfunctional conflict, Mark and Nicole can drastically improve team performance, as structural changes proved to be the most effective method by Johnson and colleagues (Johnson et al, 2013). The limitation of the structural change approach is that if this method fails, then the team would have to focus on bringing a third-party to resolve their conflict, which is very costly and if it fails, the manager will incur the necessity of personnel changes and deciding which team member to replace may be tough as both employees are valuable in different ways.