Designing through conflict: enhancing creativity and mediation skills in engineering teams

In engineering design, conflict is often perceived as disruptive, although constructive disagreement may foster creativity, collaboration, and integrative problem solving. This mixed-methods study examined whether brief creativity-oriented and mediation-informed textual prompts could immediately influence engineers’ responses to conflict scenarios in collaborative design settings. Using a randomized pre-test–post-test design, 60 practicing engineers completed an online questionnaire and were assigned to four conditions: creativity-focused, mediation-focused, combined prompts, or control. Three experienced engineering experts independently evaluated participants’ written solutions. Additionally, 27 of the 60 participants (45%) took part in follow-up semi-structured interviews, providing complementary qualitative insights. The findings revealed significant associations between targeted prompts and positive changes in expert-rated creativity and mediation-skill demonstration. Combined prompting was associated with improvements across both dimensions, suggesting complementary benefits of creative reasoning and constructive conflict-management practices. Qualitative findings highlighted the importance of collaborative dialogue and identified work processes as a major source of engineering disagreements. The study suggests that lightweight, mediation-informed interventions may support integrative problem solving within engineering workflows. However, the observed effects reflect immediate changes in written responses rather than demonstrated long-term skill acquisition or workplace behavior.