2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Effective teamwork is critical for professional success in today's complex and dynamic world. Collaborative work environments promote the sharing of unique perspectives and skills, leading to more creative and effective solutions to global problems. Teamwork allows individuals to combine their skills and knowledge to accomplish a common goal while creating a sense of synergy among team members. Teamwork is an indispensable component of success across various domains, with its significance being particularly salient in the context of engineering education, owing to the ABET requirements. In this context, there is a large body of research that has been dedicated to creating and evaluating teams in a classroom setting. Measures of team effectiveness typically involve trust, respect, and support among team members, as well as a sense of shared responsibility and mutual accountability for achieving the team's goals. Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to effective teamwork, including communication, leadership, and conflict resolution. One factor that may influence team effectiveness is teamwork predisposition of its members. Teamwork predisposition refers to the individual’s attitude towards teamwork. However, little research has focused specifically on the relationship between an individual’s teamwork predisposition and their perception of team effectiveness in an engineering education setting.
To address this gap, this paper examines the research question: "Is teamwork predisposition an indicator of team effectiveness?" In this study, team effectiveness is measured using a scale of four factors: interdependency, learning, goal setting, and potency. Surveys were administered at the beginning of the first semester and at the end of each semester of a 2-semester long course sequence at a large, midwestern, public, R1 university. The study specifically investigated students who reported low team effectiveness with two different teams over the two semesters. We hypothesize that students’ low teamwork predisposition on teaming may attribute to low evaluations of team effectiveness. The results have important implications for engineering educators and practitioners who seek to develop effective teamwork among their students and colleagues. Using teamwork predisposition as a criterion for creating teams may be an important factor for enhancing team effectiveness and learning outcomes in engineering coursework.