Research: Longitudinal Exploration of Engineering Design Team Performance in Relation to Team Composition, Climate, and Communication Patterns

今天的技术挑战变得越来越复杂。为了应对这些挑战，世界各地的工程组织正变得越来越以团队为基础。为了有效，工程团队需要拥有强大的技术技能和强大的人际交往能力。有效的团队沟通和支持所有成员积极参与的团队工作环境是成功团队合作的重要组成部分。这些技术和人际交往技能需要时间来学习，因此了解工程师在参与设计过程时这些技能是如何发展的，以及何时可能需要适当的干预来帮助工程师更有效地学习它们，这一点很重要。为此，本研究将探讨团队沟通模式在整个设计过程中对工科学生团队绩效的影响。这项研究将调查团队的组成在这些动态关系中所扮演的角色。这项研究将提供关于何时应应用团队培训干预措施以及哪些类型的干预措施将在设计过程的特定点上最有效的证据。研究结果将通过提供免费的经过测试的团队干预措施集合，使广大工程界受益，这些干预措施旨在与任何工程团队一起使用，在任何情况下工作。工程教育者和实践者可以使用这些干预措施来研究他们的团队，提高他们的团队绩效，并开发新的基于研究的团队干预措施。当在专业环境中采用这些干预措施时，有可能导致团队绩效的提高，这将节省行业背景下宝贵的时间和资源。所有这些成果将通过改善工程专业学生和从业者的团队技能和培训而造福社会，这将支持学术界和工业界的工程创新。这项建议的技术目标是：(1)建立一个模型，说明在设计过程的每个阶段人际风险承担对工程设计团队绩效的影响，以及团队沟通模式的潜在作用；(2)调查团队组成(例如，人口、个性、文化和认知差异)如何影响设计过程每个阶段的团队沟通模式和人际风险承担；以及(3)调查促进人际风险承担和提高工程团队绩效的团队干预措施。这些目标将通过以项目为基础的工程设计课程的长期经验调查来实现。该项目将创建一个工程团队有效性模型，该模型将作为工程团队研究的指导框架，并将影响研究团队的方式、量化他们的表现，以及在工程教育和实践中开发和实施干预措施。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Today's technical challenges are becoming more and more complex. Engineering organizations around the world are becoming increasingly team-based in order to deal with these challenges. In order to be effective, engineering teams need to have strong technical skills and strong interpersonal skills. Effective team communication and a team working environment that supports active engagement of all members are essential components of successful teamwork. These technical and interpersonal skills take time to learn, so it is important to understand how they develop as engineers engage in the design process and when suitable interventions might be needed to help engineers learn them more effectively. To this end, this research will explore the role of team communication patterns on engineering student team performance throughout the design process. The study will investigate the role that the composition of the team plays in these dynamic relationships. This research will provide evidence regarding when team training interventions should be applied, as well as which types of interventions will be most effective at specific points of the design process. The research findings will benefit the broad engineering community by providing a free collection of tested team interventions that are designed for use with any engineering team, working in any context. Engineering educators and practitioners can use these interventions to study their teams, improve their team performance, and develop new research-based team interventions. When adopted in professional settings, these interventions have the potential to lead to improved team performance, which will save time and resources that are at a premium in industry contexts. All of these results will benefit society by improving the team skills and training of engineering students and practitioners, which will support engineering innovation across academia and industry. The technical objectives of this proposal are: (1) to develop a model of the impact of interpersonal risk-taking on engineering design team performance at each stage of the design process and the underlying role of team communication patterns; (2) to investigate how team composition (e.g., demographic, personality, cultural, and cognitive differences) influences team communication patterns and interpersonal risk-taking at each stage of the design process; and (3) to investigate team interventions that foster interpersonal risk-taking and improve engineering team performance. These objectives will be accomplished through long-term empirical investigations in project-based engineering design courses. This project will result in the creation of a model of engineering team effectiveness, which will serve as the guiding framework for engineering team research and will impact the ways in which teams are studied, their performance is quantified, and interventions are developed and implemented in engineering education and practice.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.