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

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.