Conflict management styles assessment and feedback for student self-awareness and team development

Abstract

Teamwork skills are foundational for career success and student learning in group projects. One of the major challenges of teamwork involves managing conflict among team members. In the current research, we develop a conflict management styles (CMS) psychometric inventory that assesses students’ levels of the five styles of managing conflict based on the long-standing dual concern model: avoiding, accommodating, dominating, integrating, and compromising. Taking an educational approach, we embed the inventory in an automated web-based system that is freely accessible (www.ITPmetrics.com), and that provides students with developmental feedback upon survey completion. We present psychometric evidence for the new CMS instrument (Study 1), and develop, deploy, and qualitatively evaluate the utility of a workshop for debriefing the CMS results in student learning teams in a large engineering professional development course (Study 2). This second study finds that students reported various learning benefits and overall enjoyment of the experience, along with some suggestions for improvements. Based on this, we offer implications for engineering education, the scholarship of teaching and learning, conflict theory, and future research directions.

Keywords:

• Teamwork
• conflict management
• team development
• team-based learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas A. O’Neill

Thomas A. O’Neill is a professor within the psychology department at the University of Calgary whose research and lab focus on optimizing teamwork effectiveness.

Aliza J. Aldana

Aliza J. Aldana is a graduate student within the psychology department at the University of Calgary whose research interests include hybrid work, teams, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

Jose A. Espinoza

Jose A. Espinoza is an assistant professor within the business and administration department at the University of Winnipeg whose research interests include the role of purpose as an innate psychological need and using person-centered techniques to provide a new perspective in workplace research.

McKenna P. Sperry

McKenna P. Sperry is a graduate student within the psychology department at the University of Calgary whose research interests include team processes and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

Kyle M. Brykman

Kyle M. Brykman is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Windsor’s Odette School of Business whose research interests include employee voice, resilience, and conflict, with a specific emphasis on leading high-performance teams.

Magda B. L. Donia

Magda B. L. Donia is an associate professor within the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa whose research interests include individual and organizational giving exceeding formal role expectations and the role of peer evaluation systems in improving student teamwork performance.