Friction is not personality, it is process

Teams that argue are not automatically in trouble. Teams where arguing has become personal usually are. The distinction is not a matter of taste, it is measurable, and it points at different remedies.

Two kinds of conflict

Task conflict is disagreement about the work: which option, which evidence, which trade-off. Relationship conflict is interpersonal friction, and it travels with the people rather than the problem.

A meta-analysis of thirty studies separated the two and found relationship conflict strongly and negatively associated with both team performance and satisfaction. Notably, it found task conflict was not the straightforwardly productive force it had often been assumed to be either.

De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2003). Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 741-749.

Why the distinction is operationally useful

If the friction is about the work, the remedy is structural: make the competing assumptions explicit and testable, and the disagreement usually resolves or at least becomes tractable.

If the friction is between people, more evidence will not help. Unresolved past disagreement is relationship friction wearing the costume of a technical objection, and it does not respond to further analysis.

Which of the two you are dealing with determines whether this is a facilitation problem or a structural one.

The part that is worth measuring

Relationship friction is rarely visible in a meeting, because the people carrying it are usually the ones being most careful. It shows up instead as effort: how much work it takes two people to reach a shared position.

That is a question you can ask directly, and it is a description rather than a judgement, which is why people answer it honestly. It also has a cost attached, because the effort is being paid for in the time of the people spending it.