18.7 Dealing With Team Conflicts

Whenever there is team put together for a course deliverable, there is the potential for minor or major conflicts. It would be exceptional if everyone delivered everything in the right form of the right quality when it was expected. Just like a common hierarchical view is taking to organizational planning; strategic, tactical, and operational, a hierarchical view can also be taken with conflicts.

• The operational level can be resolved almost in real time without any substantial or worrisome downstream effects. Some momentary pain and suffering, but within a few hours things are put right. This is the day to day stuff. Rarely will these cause stress to the point of where counselling is needed or sleep will be lost. However, it is possible that someone at risk and is having serious mental health issues at the same time, operational level conflicts can have the same impact as tactical or strategic.
• The tactical level of conflict can create issues that takes weeks or even a month to deal with, resolve, and recover from. These are not trivial and can create stress and tension for the team members. There might be some sleep loss, but the team works through it and while the team might not deliver their best, it is acceptable. If someone is at risk, but in a plateau, the tactical conflict can trigger an escalation of mental health issues. And, if someone is already in the midst of a crisis, a tactical conflict with be possibly perceived as insurmountable.
• The strategic view implies that the conflict might result in harm to a student (self or others), likely failure in the project or course, and possible failure in the term. When something strategic goes wrong, you lose the war, not just the battle, the company goes bankrupt, and there is very little chance of recovery.

Conflict can be accidental and unintentional (from the clueless), intentional (from the arseholes who like to poke dead things with sticks), or as the indirect result of another intentional act (the malicious bottom feeders who purposely are trying to game the system and expect others to do all of the heavy lifting and thinking).

The paragraphs above imply that careful thinking must be done whenever conflict is detected or brought to the instructor’s attention. Without knowing the full context, the instructor might dismiss something serious as operational and expect that the conflict will work itself out. The students involved need to be considered; not just those in conflict, but the others on the team. How will each respond? What are the immediate impacts? Delayed impacts? Indirect impacts? Is it reasonable for the students to resolve the conflict themselves or will they need help? Is it reasonable for the students to even attempt resolving the conflict first?

Team conflicts cannot be brusquely dealt with or trivialized. At the end of the day, a conflict that the students perceive as serious and course threatening might turn out to be trivial and easily dealt with, but the instructor must understand the conflict, the causes, the symptoms, the situation, and the players.

These tips will not guarantee that conflicts will be avoided, minimized, or mitigated, but we have found that help in many cases.

Tips...

• Some instructions and guidelines are necessary in the course outline, project description for how conflicts are expected to be dealt with and handled.
• The instructions can clarify what types of conflicts the students should be expected to address on their own (e.g., operational, when there is no excessive stress or issues at play).
• Students should be instructed about how to document projects; things like personal logs, plans, status reports etc. These will help you knows who was supposed to do what when, and who actually did what when. This documentation and project management also helps everyone know what the expectations are.
• Students should be instructed in how to set up team projects, how to reach a consensus on quality and expectations; about the how and the what. This can avoid some of the conflicts.
• Students should know that they are not expected to ‘save’ the team or project. They are expected to do a reasonable job on their own and at the end of the day, the team will be marked, but it is possible that each individual will get a modified mark based on team execution.
• In some cases, the team might have to be disbanded or a member removed. This can be for various reasons, not that the member is a ‘bad’ student or team player, but they might actually have mental health issues and cannot function in a typical student team situation.
• Have the course TAs monitor and provide feedback on any stressful situations or dysfunctional teams.
• These tips will not guarantee that conflicts will be avoided, minimized, or mitigated, but we have found that help in many cases.
• When presenting team results, have one member randomly picked to present the whole presentation, at the time of presenting, and have one member randomly picked to answer all questions, also announced in a just-in-time fashion. This must be announced and stated in the project description. It cannot be a surprise. This style prevents excessive outsourcing and specialization on the team and ensures that there is some cross-training and learning by all team members; to the point of being good enuf.

Co-dependencies & The Necessary and Hopefully Sufficient

• An explicit recognition in the project description that conflicts can occur and a stated process for conflict resolution.
• Students need to know that they do not need to be Hercules or hero-of-the-day and do all of the work. The work will be assessed for what it is; the good, bad, and ugly, and then adjustments will be made.
• The students who deserve more, should get more. We never reduce marks or take marks away. This does still give the slackers something (i.e., parts of the projects the better students did will give them some crumbs), but not at the expense of the other students totally saving their butts.
• A parachute or escape mechanism for when a team does become toxic and someone has to leave; they want to, or others want them to.
• A pre-thought through mechanism that would allow a single student to deliver a suitable alternative.
• A guidebook for projects with ideas for how to avoid, minimize, mitigate conflicts.
• Include in the guidebook how to recognize the different types of conflicts (operational, tactical, and strategic); do not assume that students can without help.
• When discussing projects, the students need to know that minor issues are normal and that there will be bumpy periods while they learn how to work together.
• It is 100% necessary to have the students do team and individual logs, plans, and status reports. They are the only evidence the instructor can use to ‘adjust’ marks.
• Embed some kind of question on the final or last midterm that would tell you what each student actually knows about the project. This helps against possible bias or pressure on the logs. For example, you can ask what part of the project they did, issues they encountered etc. and things become interesting when two or more students claim credit for the same work. Done in an exam situation, the game playing is exposed. Yes, tis nasty, but sadly necessary.

Further reading

• Paretti, M.C., Pembridge, J.J., Brozina, S.C., Lutz, B.D. and J.N. Phanthanousy (2013). Mentoring Team Conflicts in Capstone Design: Problems and Solutions. 120th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, paper 6742.
• Zhang, X. and J.G. Roberts (2020). Integrate a conflict resolution session into the freshman engineering problem solving course to improve students’ ability to solve interpersonal team conflicts, Faculty & Staff Scholarship, 3042.