Working as a successful team member remains one of the most important skills that employers report that they want when hiring college graduates. This means that when professors create well-executed and high-quality team projects, they can help their students succeed in a challenging job market. However, there are times when professors fail to help students to develop the necessary teamwork skills that our students will need, such as helping them learn how to manage team conflict.
We surveyed college professors a few years ago to better understand the problems they face when running team projects, even learning about why some choose to avoid team projects altogether. Many reported that they struggle because of the issues that students face when working in a team, such as one student taking over the project, figuring out how to grade a team project, motivating social loafers, and including dealing with team conflict.
The reality is that conflict will inevitably occur during team projects. We can help our students work better in teams by teaching them how to manage the conflict that they will face.
Many students think that there is something wrong when conflict occurs on their team. However, conflict can be a positive force for team decision-making when it’s focused on the task, provides new perspectives on the issues, and shows how the team can improve. On the other hand, there are types of conflict that can be destructive, such as when it gets emotional and focuses on people and personal grievances, rather than the work that the team is doing.
In this article, we recommend six easy strategies to help your students try to avoid the destructive emotional conflict and better manage the substantive conflict in their team when it does occur.
1. Focus on Team Goals
It’s important to start your team project by emphasizing the importance of the team project to their work in your class. This requires more than discussing how the project paper or presentation relates to their grade. Instead, help your teams to understand the skills that they will gain from working on the project you’ve assigned. When team members see the value in your team project, they are more likely to work together on it.
2. Create a Team Charter
Start your teams off right by having them create a team charter. This should include at least three components: when and how long they will meet each week, how to contact one another, and a list of behavioral and attitudinal obligations that they have to one another. These obligations may include things like how soon to respond to messages, how responsibilities are assigned, and even how they will resolve disagreements as they work together.
3. Use Frequent Check-ins
Monitoring how well your teams are working together can help you to identify a minor conflict before it becomes a major problem. These check-ins can be accomplished through ongoing peer evaluations, when you attend their team meetings, and/or through team updates they can provide, often as an assignment on your LMS. Once you learn about a potential conflict, you can make some suggestions for how they might move forward. We have often made Google Drive folders for each team with instructor access, and we require students to write their contributions to the instructor each week as one way to keep an eye on potential issues that might derail their projects. We’ve even had these project updates impact a small portion of the final grade of the project.
4. Focus the Team on Their Task
Keep your teams focused on the team task. You can help them to accomplish this by breaking down your project into components and setting intermediary deadlines. Scaffolding a team project this way can help keep your teams moving forward rather than spiraling or stalling. You can also regularly remind them about the main goal of the assignment. Finally, make sure to explain how any conflict that occurs needs to focus on issues with substance (e.g., how to collect data, what recommendations should we give, etc.) because these are important parts of the discussions that will help their team to create a better project. Similarly, remind them that they should not be spending time hurling angry accusations at each other or talking to team members behind others’ backs. We like to use the following quote to help our students with this:
Conflict is inevitable. Anger is a choice. And almost always the wrong choice. — Seth R. Silver
This way, they begin to understand that their conflict is not a problem until it starts to boil over into frustration, anger, and even resentment that derails them.
5. Address Conflict Resolution Strategies in Class
There are many great conflict resolution strategies that you can use to help your students recover when they do in fact face some conflict. One of our favorites is a team-based Start-Stop-Continue exercise. In it, the team discusses what they should start doing (e.g., setting deadlines for completing action items), stop doing (e.g. showing up late to team meetings), and continue doing (e.g. keeping the other team members informed about their work) in order to be successful. Remind students that this is a team discussion, which means that they should use team talk (“we can start setting deadlines”) and it should not include any ‘naming or shaming’ that calls out any one team member by name.
6. Get Involved When Necessary
If you’re following the first five steps, your teams will usually work through most conflicts. But, there are times where you might need to get involved – this should be a last resort and often only when you are asked to intervene. When you get such a request, you should meet with the team outside of class time. Your main role will be listening to their issues and asking open-ended questions. This will help them to find (or maybe even gently guide them towards) a solution on their own, because your students will be more committed to a solution that they help to create. You want to avoid dictating a solution unless the team is ready to self-destruct and it is truly the only way forward.
By incorporating these six strategies into your team project, your students will be more likely to:
- Have a better team experience in your class;
- Learn important skills that will help them in future teams;
- Be more likely to successfully work in teams in other classes; and
- Have a compelling story that they can share with potential employers about how well they worked in a team.
In addition, it will improve your own experience with team projects (and make them easier for you to grade, too)!
Tim Franz is Professor of Psychology and Lauren Vicker is Communications Professor Emeritus, both at St. John Fisher University. We started working together to team-teach a course in group dynamics beginning in 2004, coming from the fields of psychology and communications. We have presented, written, and published on teamwork and team projects, with our latest effort being Making Team Projects Work: A College Instructor’s Guide to Successful Student Groupwork, published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2025. Approaching the issue from two different perspectives and teaching beyond our own home disciplines in business, pharmacy, criminology, etc. has given us a broad perspective into the issue.