The Conflict Resolution Behavior of Interdisciplinary Teams for Promoting a Collaborative Design Process

2. 1. Conflict in Design Teams

Since the design process is complicated, involves ill-defined problems, and demands collaboration with different experts, conflicts, which are defined as disagreements among individuals, are unavoidable in design teams as they are part of the problem-solving process. Conflict among teams can be classified into three types: cognitive conflict associated with task-related issues, affective conflict involving negative emotions regarding interpersonal incompatibilities, and process conflict concerning planning and distributions of responsibility (Jehn, 1995; Badke-Schaub, Goldschmidt, & Meijer, 2010). Among them, cognitive conflict in particular relates to the creative process of design; cognitive conflicts resulting from different ideas and perspectives on task-oriented issues provide more opportunities to create innovative ideas (Badke-Schaub et al., 2010). On the contrary, affective conflicts decrease motivation and openness, and process conflicts reduce productivity (Amason, Thompson, Hochwarter, & Harrison, 1995; Jehn & Mannix, 2001). Because this study approaches collaborative design as a problem-solving process rather than a socio-emotional process, we focus on cognitive conflicts as contributory potential to promote effectiveness in the collaborative design process.

2. 2. Conflict Resolution Behavior in Collaborative Design

Collaborative design is described as a process that brings together participants from different disciplines who share their knowledge to achieve a mutual objective (Kleinsmann, 2006). In the collaborative design process, how to resolve conflict has been concerned as a critical issue (Klein & Lu, 1989). Brown (2013) defines conflict as one of the ways to reach a shared understanding in the design process and describes how design teams in particular behave to resolve conflicts in the collaborative design process in the following ways. First, design teams try to persuade one person involved in a conflict to accommodate their counterpart’s position. When one person is fully convinced of their counterpart’s opinion, that person will accept their position voluntarily. Second, design teams attempt to find alternatives by revising or refining incompatible ideas iteratively. After an iterative idea generation process, design teams reach a compromise to resolve conflicts. Third, design teams try to see incompatible issues from a different perspective. The design process is moved forward by shifting the design teams’ perspective. Fourth, design teams attempt to hold off making decisions when the team needs more information to determine incompatibility. Although a deferred decision can resolve conflicts for a while, this will create challenges in the later phase of design process. Finally, design teams try to return to common ground when the team recognizes that they have reached an impasse. By returning to the fundamentals, the design team can create a productive platform to re-explore mutually acceptable decisions. Based on the nature of conflict resolutions, this study determines the conflict resolution behavior of design teams as follows: Persuasion, Alternatives, Different Perspective, Deferred Decisions, and Common Ground (see Table 3 for examples of each behavior).

2. 3. Collaborative Design in Education

Since the essential concern of design education is to encourage students’ capabilities to solve design problems and produce innovative artifacts, collaborative design is widely employed in design education to foster creativity (Kleinsmann & Valkenburg, 2008; Kim, Ju, & Lee, 2015). Students can move beyond their own perspectives and promote the capabilities of collaboration by sharing their knowledge about design content and the design process. However, if student design teams are incapable of dealing with conflicts appropriately, educational effects will be impeded during the collaborative design process. Thus, it is necessary to investigate how student design teams cope with conflict to support successful collaboration in design education.

3. 1. Overview of the Experimentation

To identify the conflict resolution behavior of interdisciplinary teams, a protocol study was designed in a controlled laboratory setting. Eight interdisciplinary teams of 32 undergraduate students participated in the experiment. Considering that the field of design is actively associated with technology, business and human values, each team consisted of four members majoring in design, business, engineering, and humanities. Eight teams of four students each were equally assigned to interdisciplinary teams, maintaining same ratio for the team member’s disciplines. To eliminate and prevent bias, verification was performed to ensure that the team members had never worked together prior to the experiment.

The design task assigned to the design teams was to propose a conceptual design that made studying at the university more fun for the students. The design task was designed to be ill-defined, challenging, and understandable within the participants’ knowledge. Prior to conducting the task, the researcher provided instructions on how to conduct the design task followed by a question and answer session. All teams were required to solve the design task collaboratively within an hour and then spend a quarter of an hour articulating a design concept as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Examples of design concept articulation

Each team managed their design process independently within the allocated time. Team communications were recorded completely and the verbal data were transferred to transcripts to capture their conflict resolution behavior. To investigate the benefits and obstacles in interdisciplinary collaboration, a retrospective interview was implemented separately at the end of the experiment.

3. 2. Coding procedure

The protocol analysis was conducted by two coders who were experienced in design research to ensure the results’ reliability (Akin & Lin, 1995). The analysis was carried out according to the following procedure. A training session proceeded to examine the appropriateness of the analysis methods and the transcripts of the eight interdisciplinary teams’ discussions were given to the coders. First, two coders encoded the data verbalization independently to capture conflicts, as depicted in Table 1. In total, 120 conflicts were collected from the first coding session. Figure 2 describes the frequencies of conflicts among the design teams.

Table 1

Example of protocols coded for conflicts

Figure 2

Frequencies of conflicts in the design teams

Second, based on the coding scheme, as described in Table 2, the coders encoded conflict resolution behaviors separately. Some of the conflict resolution behaviors possibly do not fit into the classified behavior; therefore, the coding scheme includes an “Others” classification.

Table 2

Coding scheme for conflict resolution behaviors

Third, the researcher checked the reliability of the coding by testing the consistency between the two coders. The inter-reliability of the coding categories was .938. The two coders discussed the differences in coding to eliminate any vagueness and mistakes and then consolidated the data for analysis. Table 3 describes how the coders encoded for conflict resolution behavior.

Table 3

Example of protocols coded for conflict resolution behavior

3 .3. Data analysis

The conflict resolution behaviors of the interdisciplinary teams were analyzed in three ways. First, frequency analysis was conducted to identify their conflict resolution behavior. Second, unclassifiable conflict resolution behaviors were classified according to their content similarity. Finally, additional insights into interdisciplinary collaboration in design education were discussed based on the analysis of retrospective interview.

4. 1. Analysis of Conflict Resolution Behavior

The most dominant conflict resolution behavior is “Alternative,” followed by “Persuasion”; meanwhile, the interdisciplinary teams seldom employed “Different Perspective,” “Common Ground,” or “Deferred Decision.” Table 4 describes the frequencies of the conflict resolution behavior for the eight interdisciplinary teams.

Table 4

Frequencies of conflict resolution behavior among the eight teams

First, the design teams employed “Alternative” behavior most frequently to resolve conflicts; the teams tried to revise their conflicting ideas and propose substitutes iteratively to adjust incompatibilities. For instance, a conflict emerged in Team 8 while discussing appropriate form of a desk; the ideation lasted for a while until an acceptable idea was proposed. Table 5 shows how the teams activated the collaborative design process by validating and elaborating ideas through “Alternative” behavior.

Table 5

Example of “Alternative” behavior

Second, “Persuasion” behavior helped the design teams’ ability to achieve a shared understanding; accepting the counterpart’s position concluded the conflict. Based on a shared understanding of the subject of conflict, the teams could move their design process forward. Table 6 shows how conflict was resolved by employing “Persuasion” behavior in Team 5.

Table 6

Example of “Persuasion” behavior

Third, the design teams in particular employed “Alternative” behavior subsequent to “Persuasion” behavior; when one team member involved in a conflict was fully convinced of a counterpart’s position, that person often tried to modify their conflicting idea immediately. Table 7 shows how Team 1 continued developing their ideas explicitly by combining the “Persuasion” behavior with “Alternative” behavior.

Table 7

Example of “Alternative” behavior subsequent to “Persuasion” behavior

Fourth, “Different Perspective” behavior enabled the design teams to consider diverse possibilities. For instance, Team 1 confronted a conflict while developing their idea of redesigning the on-campus library, as described in Table 8. A design major student in Team 1 proposed a new approach to make studying more fun. Due to his new perspective, the team discussed a wide range of ideas that could make studying more pleasant for students.

Table 8

Example of “Different Perspective” behavior

Fifth, “Common Ground” behavior was employed when the design teams recognized that they could not reach a compromise involving the conflicts. Table 9 shows how Team 4 resolved the impasse and entered a new phase of the design process by sharing their personal experiences and knowledge. Despite incompatible conflicts, the “Common Ground” behavior revitalized the teams’ design process.

Table 9

Example of “Common Ground” behavior

Finally, the design teams employed “Deferred Decision” behavior when one person wanted to consider more before making a decision. For instance, although one person in Team 7 agreed with the idea of providing students with rewards, he decided to hold off until the teams could come up with more effective ways to distribute rewards. Through this, the design team alleviated their conflict for a while and elaborate their idea, as depicted in Table 10.

Table 10

Example of “Deferred Decision” behavior

4. 2. Analysis of Unclassifiable Conflict Resolution Behavior

In total, 16 conflicts that were distilled from the experimentation were considered unclassifiable. According to their similarity, the unclassifiable conflicts resolution behaviors were clustered as follows: Control, Defense, Avoidance, Competition, and Disinterest. Figure 3 depicts the frequencies of conflict resolution behaviors that were newly uncovered from the experimentation.

Figure 3

Frequencies of unclassifiable conflict resolution behaviors

First, “Control” behavior is exemplified by the one person in the team who attempts to suppress their team members’ argument. Unlike the results of “Persuasion” behavior, conflicts conclude without reaching a mutual agreement. For instance, when one person in Team 2 objected to the team’s idea on the grounds of its great expense, his argument was undermined by another person who argued that cost was not significant when proposing a conceptual design, as depicted in Table 11.

Table 11

Example of “Control” behavior

Second, “Defense” behavior protects a person instead of solving incompatibilities; objecting to the team’s idea often made design teams defensive. For instance, when one person in Team 7 pointed out that the proposed idea was unrelated to the subject, the other person involved in the conflict tried to protect himself rather than consider the problematic issue. Table 12 shows how “Defense” behavior hinder the creative process of finding substitutes or modifying the conflicting idea.

Table 12

Example of “Defense” behavior

Third, “Avoidance” behavior is displayed when the subject is changed immediately without any discussion when incompatibilities occur. For instance, when one person in Team 4 pointed out a problematic issue in the team’s idea, another person proposed a new idea promptly, as depicted in Table 13. Although this behavior, described as “Avoidance,” seemed to advance the design process, it made the team miss new opportunities to improve the current idea.

Table 13

Example of “Avoidance” behavior

Fourth, “Competition” behavior is to prefer different ideas obstinately. In Team 5, when two team members each asserted their own perspective; they gave no specific reasons for their claims, and so the conflict decrease team performance, as described in Table 14. To make the collaborative process more efficient, “Competition” behavior should only be encouraged when conflicting parties claim rational arguments.

Table 14

Example of “Competition” behavior

Fifth, “Disinterest” behavior is a display of indifference in regard to finding a resolution for conflict. When one person in Team 5 pointed out that the idea’s scope was too broad to implement, another person was unconcerned with making a decision and handed over his power of decision to the others, as described in Table 15. Although the interdisciplinary teams seldom used “Disinterest” behavior in the design process, it is an unhealthy way of dealing with conflict since it hinders the decision-making process.

Table 15

Example of “Disinterest” behavior

4. 3. Retrospective Interview

After experimentation, each participant was questioned about the benefits and difficulties of conflict resolution behavior during the collaborative design process. The significant findings from the interview were described as follows.

First, the participants learned new ways to approach design problems from each other while resolving conflicts. For instance, a humanities-major student reported that it was impressive how they could solve conflicts with respect to the design problem in practical terms, unlike the process to which she was accustomed. In addition, a design-major student stated that it was valuable to approach design problems rationally, whereas she was used to concentrating on visualization. Considering that design teams discover diverse ways to solve design problems themselves, interdisciplinary collaboration provides opportunities for students to be self-directed learners.

Meanwhile, interdisciplinary teams had difficulties resolving conflicts caused by different understandings of design terminologies. The most remarkable difference between team members was how they recognize the notion of design; the engineering-major students limited their designs to production to create tangible artifacts, whereas the design- and business-major students regarded designing from a macro perspective by including planning, product creation, and even proposed services. For instance, Table 16 shows how conflicts arose consecutively in Team 5 and hindered the collaborative design process. Because each member of the team viewed the concept of design differently, the conflicts re-emerged until the engineering student was persuaded by the business student’s argument. Considering that disparate viewpoints on the idea of design will bring a series of conflicts in collaborative design processes, it is necessary to educate interdisciplinary teams to create a shared understanding on the concept of design; this will prevent interdisciplinary teams from wasting time resolving the conflicts and consequently increase team performance.

Table 16

Example of conflicts caused by disparate viewpoints on design

Finally, interdisciplinary teams had difficulties in the collaborative design process due to their different educational backgrounds with respect to collaboration; students majoring in engineering and humanities reported that they were used to conducting assignments alone instead of working with a team, whereas students who majored in design and business stated that they were used to working on school projects with a team. Improving the collaborative design process requires providing more opportunities to work with students from different disciplines in education.