2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research on the school-to-work transition highlights teamwork, including conflict management, as one of the most significant challenges new engineers face. Poorly managed conflict at work can negatively impact health and well-being, disrupt team performance, increase turnover, and more. Research on how new engineers experience and manage conflict at work is narrow, limiting our knowledge on how to best prepare engineers with these critical skills. To address that gap, we draw on data from a multi-institutional study tracking graduates’ challenges in the transition to professional practice to explore new engineers’ early workplace experiences with conflict and ask:

RQ: What are common types of conflicts new engineers experience in their first year of work?

This case study uses secondary data analysis to examine how new engineers navigate conflict during their first year of work. We draw on semi-structured interviews with 50 mechanical engineering graduates across four diverse U.S. institutions after three, six and 12-months at their new jobs. Data analysis entailed inductive-deductive coding to identity themes of common types of conflict, and types of conflict (task, relationship, and process) as an a priori framework, in addition to identification of conflict level.

Findings underscore the diverse and complex nature of workplace conflicts for engineers compared to the predominantly intragroup conflict faced by students. While conflicts related to design decisions, personality differences, and miscommunications are common in both academic teams and the workplace, additional issues salient for new engineers involve intergroup conflicts, organizational-level issues, and conflicts related to identity, power dynamics, and status. Relationship conflicts arose from interpersonal interactions including competitive co-workers, withholding of information, and extended beyond personality clashes related to gender and identity including stereotyping and overt sexism. Both task and non-task (relationship) conflicts intensified tensions between engineering groups such as R&D and production, as well as engineers, architects, and contractors. Findings further detail new engineers’ difficulties related to workplace power dynamics and decisions to escalate issues, highlighting the critical role that supervisors and managers play in managing both intragroup and intergroup conflict. These findings suggest that preparing students for teamwork in education should extend beyond intragroup dynamics to include broader workplace realities, such as cross-functional collaboration and conflict mediation involving leadership.