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Synchronisation is a central mechanism of temporal and spatial order in fields ranging from physics to biology to sociology. Its study is therefore transversal to the system of interest. In coupled oscillator systems, synchronisation arises from the communication between the oscillation states of the components. In developmental biology, for example, a set of biochemical oscillators governs the formation of the spinal cord. Some aspects of the system have been successfully described using phase oscillators with generic couplings, as in the Kuramoto model. However, to describe certain regimes of the problem a more detailed description is needed. Each oscillator is described by several components, and the communication mechanism involves a complex interaction between the coupled oscillator components. In this model, the oscillators are expected to synchonise when traversing the region of the coupling function with higher dynamic range. Conversely, when traversing the flat regions of the coupling function, the oscillators are not expected to synchronise. However, under certain conditions synchronisation is lost in the former case. In this work we study the response of a system of autonomous oscillators to harmonic forcing. We find possible causes for this lack of synchronisation and find necessary conditions to achieve synchronisation in limit cases. This approach, which decouples the system response from the synchronisation signal, allows us to understand non-intuitive effects arising from the complexity of the system. More broadly, our work illustrates the effect of complex couplings on synchronisation phenomena.