2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Developing a team into a learning organization has been shown to create high-performing teams. Amy Edmondson’s work showed that forming a learning organization requires a psychologically safe environment. The current research comes from studies into industry and professional organizations, but there is little work showing if teams of students develop psychologically safe teams. The current study is a work-in-progress collaboration between three different engineering colleges focusing on improving teamwork experiences in senior capstone teams. Driving the current study are two questions: What is the state of psychological safety and teamwork satisfaction in engineering capstone teams? What teamwork-related instruction do faculty provide their senior capstone teams? The data collected also help us determine if different student populations experience different levels of psychological safety on their capstone teams. The results help us establish a satisfactory level of psychological safety and teamwork satisfaction and they show that the majority of students actually work on teams with satisfactory levels of psychological safety and teamwork satisfaction. Data from faculty at the three institutions show that a minority of engineering faculty require their teams to complete teamwork contracts as the primary teamwork intervention. A smaller minority of faculty provide team building exercises/practice as well as self-awareness, team awareness, interpersonal dynamics, conflict resolution, or negotiation instruction to their senior capstone students. Future work will focus on assessing the impact of specific interventions to improve psychological safety in senior capstone teams and provide tools to faculty to implement more intentional teamwork interventions for their capstone teams.