期刊名称：Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association
出版年度：2015
语种：English
出版社：The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
摘要：This study examines factors influencing student conflict management styles in a team-based second year mechanical engineering design course. Maddux described conflict management along the dimensions of assertiveness (seeking to meet one’s own needs) and cooperativeness (seeking to meet the other party’s needs). The key research questions in this study were how conflict management styles changed as a result of participation in an intense team-based course and whether gender or personality type influenced students’ conflict management styles. Students completed a pre-course team formation survey that included prompts on how they would deal with different scenarios representing common team conflicts; students responded to the same prompts again in a project exit survey. Students’ responses in these surveys were used to code their preferred approach for dealing with conflicts. Two independent reviewers worked from randomized, anonymous survey data and coded students’ responses along the two dimensions of Maddux’ model. The results indicate conflict management style is context dependent (the distribution of responses changed for the different survey prompts). The most commonly used conflict management style was Compromising, in which parties find a middle ground but neither fully achieves their goals. A statistically significant reduction in assertiveness was found between pre- and post-surveys. Statistically significant differences in assertiveness were also noted with a number of Myers-Briggs personality type pairs in the pre-survey. The fact that similar differences were not observed in the post-survey suggests that the project experience has a normalizing effect on conflict management style. Meaningful statistically significant differences in conflict management style based on gender were not observed.
