Collaboration and Conflict in Interdisciplinary Teams
Dr. Weingart explores how to recognize, navigate, and leverage workplace conflict to build trust, collaboration, and performance.
Overview
Working across disciplines brings both opportunities and challenges, at times leading to gaps in understanding and conflict that can hinder innovation. This seminar offers actionable strategies to strengthen collaboration by improving cognitive and affective integration—building shared understanding, trust, and respect among diverse experts. We’ll discuss the importance of channeling disagreements into productive debate and deliberation, turning conflict into a driver of creativity and team success.
Objectives
- Understand the sources and types of conflict that arise in interdependent work relationships and teams;
- Learn how to identify and bridge differences in perspectives, values, and priorities that drive conflict;
- Apply evidence-based strategies to manage and express conflict productively to strengthen trust, collaboration, and team performance.
Target Audience
This workshop is appropriate for any Johns Hopkins or ICTR partner researcher interested in improving their ability to lead or work within interdisciplinary research teams effectively. Interdisciplinary research teams can look like many things. It might be cross-school collaborations (e.g., Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, Engineering, Arts & Sciences, Education, or Business), collaborations across different department or fields of study, or collaborations with different types of organizations and institutions (e.g., community-academic partnerships). Whether you are starting a new team or seeking to enhance the effectiveness of your current team, this workshop will provide you with insights and tools to apply in your work.
Speaker Bio
Laurie R. Weingart, Ph.D. is the Richard M. and Margaret S. Cyert Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and leads the Collaboration and Conflict Research Lab. She has served in several leadership roles within Carnegie Mellon, including Senior Associate Dean of Education in the Tepper School, CMU’s interim provost/chief academic officer, and Chair of CMU’s Faculty Senate.
Coauthor of The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work, her research and teaching examines collaboration, conflict, and negotiation, with a focus on how differences across people both help and hinder effective problem solving and innovation. A recipient of the Joseph E. McGrath Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Groups, Professor Weingart has published over 70 articles and book chapters in the fields of management, psychology, and economics. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Management, the Society of Organizational Behavior, and the Society for Experimental and Social Psychology. Her award-winning research has been covered by major news outlets in the US and around the world.
Professor Weingart’s influence extends to her profession having served as president of the International Association for Conflict Management, founding president of the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research, and as editor of the highly influential Academy of Management Annals. Dr. Weingart earned her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.