2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Building psychological safety and conflict resolution capacity to enhance team cohesion within the NSF RED Program

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session II

Since the inception of the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Program in 2015, RED teams have worked to implement significant changes in engineering education. To facilitate such revolutionary changes in higher education, requirements were put in place by NSF to ensure that RED teams are composed of individuals in various institutional roles who hold diverse skills. Most of the RED teams have experienced some PI and senior personnel turnover during their funding period, and they have had to work hard to maintain team cohesion and momentum amidst those changes.

This paper will explore two concepts that can help build and maintain team cohesion, namely psychological safety within a team, and capacity to resolve conflicts in a psychologically safe and productive ways. Psychological safety is a shared belief held by team members that the other members of the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish them for speaking up (Edmondson, 1999). Inclusive and efficient teams are key to generating innovative, cross-cutting, and sustainable changes in higher education. Research suggests that for the most success, high-performing teams must continually and actively foster psychological safety among the team members. However, even in the presence of psychological safety, conflict will occur. Teams that have built capacity to respond to that conflict productively (Grenny et al., 2022, Heen & Stone, 2010) can reestablish psychological safety and enable progress.

This paper will review results of a group working session involving 42 members of 12 current and past RED teams. The session focused on identifying the level of psychological safety within the RED teams, as well as strategies that have helped RED teams foster psychological safety and resolve conflict constructively within their own teams. The paper will present the data collected through a validated survey (Edmondson, 1999) and discuss research-based strategies that can be utilized to foster psychological safety and productive conflict resolution. Furthermore, the paper will present an overview of strategies that RED teams have identified as useful for fostering psychological safety and for building conflict resolution capacity, and examples of behaviors that can suppress psychological safety on their teams.

The findings from this paper are domain agnostic and highly transferable, and therefore will be of value to any individual working in a team setting, especially change agents working in teams, as teams that foster psychological safety have been shown to produce more innovative changes (Kark & Carmeli, 2009).

Authors

Dr. Eva Andrijcic Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Eva Andrijcic serves as an Associate Professor of Engineering Management at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Her major interests are in the areas of risk analysis and management, and organizational change management.
Dr. Michelle Marincel Payne Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Michelle Marincel Payne is an Associate Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology, and her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla (same school, different name). At Rose-Hulman, Michelle is co-leading a project to infuse an entrepreneurial-mindset in undergraduate students’ learning, and a project to improve teaming by teaching psychological safety in engineering education curricula. Michelle also mentors undergraduate researchers to investigate the removal of stormwater pollutants in engineered wetlands. Michelle was a 2018 ExCEEd Fellow, and was recognized as the 2019 ASCE Daniel V. Terrell Awardee.
Dr. Julia M. Williams http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-8367-9463 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Julia M. Williams was Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She is the author of Making Changes in STEM Education (Routledge 2023) and a member of the ASEE Hall of Fame.
Dr. Sriram Mohan Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Sriram Mohan is a Professor in the Deparment of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Rose-Hulman institute of Technology. Sriram received a B.E degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Madras and M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Indiana University. During his time at Rose-Hulman, Sriram has served as a consultant in Hadoop and NoSQL systems and has helped a variety of clients in the Media, Insurance, and Telecommunication sectors. In addition to his industrial consulting activities, Sriram maintains an active research profile in data science and education research that has led to over 30 publications or presentations. At Rose-Hulman, Sriram has focused on incorporating reflection, and problem based learning activities in the Software Engineering curriculum. Sriram has been fundamental to the revamp of the entire software engineering program at Rose-Hulman. Sriram is a founding member of the Engineering Design program and continues to serve on the leadership team that has developed innovative ways to integrate Humanities, Science, Math, and Engineering curriculum into a studio based education model. In 2015, Sriram was selected as the Outstanding Young Alumni of the year by the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. Sriram serves as a facilitator for MACH, a unique faculty development experience, aimed at helping faculty and administrator develop a change agent tool box.
Dr. Elizabeth Litzler http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-8473 University of Washington [biography]

Elizabeth Litzler, Ph.D., is the director of the University of Washington Center for Evaluation and Research for STEM Equity (UW CERSE) and an affiliate assistant professor of sociology. She has been at UW working on STEM Equity issues for more than 20 years.
Dr. Rae Jing Han University of Washington [biography]

Dr. Rae Jing Han (they/them) is a Research Scientist at the University of Washington Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity.
Selen Güler University of Washington [biography]

Selen Güler is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Washington, and a research assistant at the University of Washington’s Center for Evaluation and Research for STEM Equity (CERSE). Selen’s research interests include institutional change, social movements, and the cultural foundations of policy-making.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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