2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Psychological safety, or “the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking” has been linked to positive outcomes on design teams including improved idea quality, improved learning behavior and knowledge creation, and higher job satisfaction. Research in other fields suggest that psychological safety may also contribute to team creativity and innovation which are important in engineering and design practice and education. Psychological safety has received growing attention in engineering design and education . However, research on interventions to increase psychological safety on engineering and design teams remains limited. Building on a previous Work in Progress paper, we tested an intervention based in improv theater designed to increase psychological safety on engineering design teams. In this work, we conducted an experiment using a randomized controlled trial design. Students from two different engineering courses were randomly assigned to teams of 4 students, and teams were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions; treatment and control teams were assigned in both classes. We had 92 total participants on 22 teams. The intervention used in the treatment condition consisted of two exercises that we call “Yes, and” and “Thank you, because” which took a total of 25 minutes. Control teams completed parallel activities to ensure that all teams spent the same amount of time together. Following the intervention, participants completed a survey which included Edmondson’s Team Psychological Safety Scale to compare results between the treatment and control groups. We conducted a Welch Two Sample t-test in R to compare team-level psychological safety between the treatment and control teams and find no statistically significant difference. Our findings suggest that our intervention either did not work or our sample size was too small to detect the effect of the intervention. We conclude by assessing why the intervention may not have worked and by outlining next steps for this line of work.