The effects of team member intrinsic differences on emergent team dynamics and long-term innovative performance in engineering design teams
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- An increasing amount of work and learning takes place in a team context. Corporations rely on multidisciplinary teams to create innovative products, and team-based education is becoming an established and widespread practice. But what really makes for a great team? How do we put teams together, and how can we guarantee that they will be effective? Moreover, how can we encourage those teams to be more creative in their problem-solving? In many ways, we lack standard measurements of these individual aspects (e.g. there is no single accepted measure for team performance) and we also lack a holistic model describing the interplay between these aspects. This study takes a particular focus on design engineering teams working to develop innovative solutions to challenging multidisciplinary problems. Prior research informs us that intrinsic functional diversity can create the precondition for constructive task-based conflict within the team, contributing to an increased likelihood of innovative outcomes. However, diversity is also known to have mixed and often negative effects on team function, particularly at the level of emergent team phenomena such as conflict and communication (broadly defined as the team dynamic). A coherent model is needed to understand how intrinsic compositional aspects reliably impact team dynamics, and ultimately, how the team dynamics and underlying compositional characteristics interact to affect performance. A methodology is presented that attempts such an end-to-end description of team composition, dynamics and performance, principally relying on the Wilde Type indicator as a measurement of intrinsic differences. Results support the use of this instrument at the individual and team level, as well as offering insight into the impact of composition and diversity on team dynamics, and the ultimate effects on performance. Opportunities are explored for improved interventions in the team dynamic on the basis of these results.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Kress, Gregory Lewis |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering |
| Primary advisor | Leifer, Larry J |
| Thesis advisor | Leifer, Larry J |
| Thesis advisor | Cutkosky, Mark R |
| Thesis advisor | Steinert, Ralf |
| Thesis advisor | Wilde, Douglass J |
| Advisor | Cutkosky, Mark R |
| Advisor | Steinert, Ralf |
| Advisor | Wilde, Douglass J |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Gregory Lewis Kress. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Gregory Lewis Kress
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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