By the time we retire, most of us will have spent around 90,000 hours—equal to 10 years and four months around the clock—with people who are not of our choosing. Workplace relationships dominate our adult lives. We share our desks, quiet spaces and coffee pots with our co-workers; they influence our stress levels, well-being, and our relationships with our spouses and children.

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By the time we retire, most of us will have spent around 90,000 hours—equal to 10 years and four months around the clock—with people who are not of our choosing. Workplace relationships dominate our adult lives. We share our desks, quiet spaces and coffee pots with our co-workers; they influence our stress levels, well-being, and our relationships with our spouses and children.

Dealing with difficult people at work often depends on the first thing you say. This is an example of how not to talk to a free rider, and how to do so.

Illustration: Michael Parkin

It isn’t surprising that given how little say we have over who we work with, we have everyday conflict at work, and a lot of it. Small daily annoyances, like being interrupted, taken advantage of, and shoved to the sidelines are common. They typically don’t rise to the level of a formal complaint, but cumulatively they can make all the difference in how we perceive and enjoy work. Yet many of us believe that learning to grin and bear such low-level conflicts is part of being a working adult. We rarely attempt to solve or prevent them. We just accept that the colleague is a bit of a jerk, and move on.

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It doesn’t have to be that way. Decades of social-science research shows us how to effectively deal with conflict with those closest to us—spouses, children and lifelong friends. But since most of us compartmentalize our relationships, we don’t think of applying what we know about our closest relationships to the workplace. The reality, though, is that our personal and workplace relationships aren’t so different in kind.

With that in mind, here are three lessons from the science of close relationships that we can apply to everyday conflict at work.

Don’t avoid confronting people at work. But when you do it, don’t lead with criticism, lead with a compliment.

Imagine a co-worker who gets by on charm and social graces alone—a person who harbors real talent, but who refuses to use any of it out of laziness, disorganization or both. Such free riders may pass off their share of a team project to the new interns. Others split their work into small pieces so when they ask team members to help them out “just this time,” no one person feels the extra load.

Conscientious people are the most common victims of free riders, and the most likely to feel resentment when they realize how unjust the distribution of labor has been. Many of them (they’re conscientious, remember?) just grudgingly accept the added work. But eventually even the most accepting may reach a breaking point, and their instinct is to chastise the free rider, sometimes publicly in front of the whole team for maximum effect, with the goal of shaming them into working hard.

This strategy often backfires. Co-workers respond to outright criticism with about as much enthusiasm as spouses do. If you approach your free rider with a criticism (“You’ve hardly done any work while the rest of us have been picking up your slack”), you’ll likely get an angry, defensive response, or an outright denial (“If you weren’t so disorganized, I would be able to do my work!”). And you, in turn, would likely respond by digging in your heels. The interaction ends in a stalemate. This pattern doesn’t just characterize conflict at work; it’s the hallmark for couples headed for divorce.

How not to talk to a micromanager, and a better approach.

Illustration: Michael Parkin

A better strategy is to lead with a compliment before bringing up the free riding. Remind your free rider why you were excited to have them on your team in the first place. Then, when you do criticize, focus on specific behaviors (“I learned that Lisa the intern has been doing your weekly reports”), not on what the behavior says about them (“Asking Lisa to do your work is so unprofessional”). This small change in language makes a world of difference in stopping a destructive communication pattern. Free riders are more likely to re-engage if they are missed instead of chastised.

The same basic strategy works on your boss, especially ones whose pattern of behaviors interfere with your ability to get things done, like micromanagers.

Instead of confronting your micromanager with, “You smother me, and I can’t get things done,” try this: “I love the attention you give to my work, but your requests for turnaround time don’t work for me—the last time it was 20 minutes. Can we make a plan of action together of what our timeline for getting things done will be?”

If you are infuriated with someone at work, bring them closer, don’t push them away.

Most of us have encountered someone at work who is so infuriating that simply running into them in the hall is enough to turn our mood sour. Take, for example, the bulldozer: the person who talks over everyone during meetings and goes behind people’s backs to the people in power to get their way.

The last thing most of us want to do is engage more with a bulldozing co-worker. It’s just too exhausting. But from the perspective of relationship science, avoidance isn’t the best strategy for dealing with these colleagues—redirection is. It works on helping teenagers engage in safe behavior during risk taking, and it can help bulldozers put their tactics to good use.

Bulldozers—like out-of-line teens—are attention seekers. But the good news is, there’s a good probability that there are a handful of people who don’t feel heard in meetings who could use someone like a bulldozer to echo their contributions.

Approach your bulldozer and ask them to help boost the voices of others. “If anyone interrupts Jay, can you make sure he gets the floor back? And when he makes a point, can you call him out and make sure he gets credit for it?” Everyone likes to feel included, and your bulldozer will learn how to put their talents to good use.

The best allies at work aren’t our close friends and confidants. They are well-connected colleagues who work at arm’s length.

One of the strongest predictors of happiness at work is having a best friend. Like disclosing to our romantic partners, disclosing to our work friends brings us closer together and makes us feel supported.

But close friends often don’t make the best allies at work, particularly when it comes to solving tricky problems with difficult people.

Take, for example, the case of the kiss-up-kick-down co-worker—the person who the boss loves but who tortures you behind the scenes. These folks are willing to do anything to get ahead.

To beat them, you need to find other targets of abuse. There’s strength in numbers, and your boss is more likely to respond to your complaints about their favorite team member if they think the problem is widespread. To find those people, though, you need a co-worker who doesn’t have the same social network as you—someone who can connect you to other colleagues who have worked with your kiss-up-kick-downer in the past, or who knows others who have. The more outside of your immediate network you can go to find allies, the better. Why? The less social connections you have to these folks, the bigger the red flag, and the more motivated your boss will be to fix it. It’s easier to brush off conflict that’s “local”—it affects you and a handful of your close friends—than one that is “global” and affects multiple people who are spread out from each other. Clearly the problem isn’t you (and your buddies), it’s your kiss-up-kick-downer.

And there’s an added benefit to aligning yourself with arm’s-length folks: Unlike our best friends, they aren’t motivated to take our side to make us feel better. They serve as a good reality check.

Arm’s-length allies can also help you gain influence at work in ways that best friends can’t. Credit thieves, who sneak in and steal credit for other people’s good ideas, often succeed when the person they steal from has no “voice”—this means that when they speak up, no one listens. As social science has taught us, we gain voice by forming broad social connections with people who can give us insider information on how to make sure we’re heard. Information like small favors we can do to get the boss to pay attention to us, and what tactics the people in power find the most convincing. I once learned from an arm’s-length ally that the best way to convince a boss that we had a problem was by conducting a “pulse survey” that captured people’s feelings—something I never would have learned otherwise.

Best friends make you feel good, but well-connected allies who are outside of your immediate network have a wealth of knowledge that can help you get there; you just need to learn to ask for it.

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As with all the advice, there’s a wealth of science out there on how to handle conflict with difficult people, but only if we know where to look. Learning a handful of these skills will make work life now—and in the future—less stressful and more productive. After all, we all know colleagues who are kind of jerks. What we don’t know is that there are alternatives to just putting up with them.

Dr. West is an associate professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them.” She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.