4.2.3 Cultural Differences in Systems Engineering: What They Are, What They Aren't, and How to Measure Them

Abstract

Despite frequent use of the term culture in contemporary engineering practice, there is currently no reliable way of understanding what constitutes true shared beliefs and meanings that impact how groups of Systems Engineers spread across multiple departments and countries work together. This paper develops a framework to address that gap and measure cultural variation in Systems Engineering contexts. Drawing from the field of cultural anthropology, we demonstrate methods to empirically measure cultural consensus and divergence related to fostering collaboration, understanding business success or failure, and identifying characteristics of effective cross-functional teams. The discussion identifies substantive content of what real organizational cultures are, where they are different, and where they overlap. That quantified content feeds culture as a rigorous element of organizational strategy into global alignment and process excellence or six sigma initiatives targeted at changing team behavior. The result is a framework for conducting rigorous, empirical investigations to truly understand the human dimensions that are critical to effective Systems Engineering practice. We discuss areas this approach applies to global process alignment and team effectiveness.

Determination of Type I Error and Power Rate in Differential Item Functioning by Several Methods

“…Yanlı bir maddenin kesinlikle DMF içerdiği söylenebilirken; bir maddede DMF olması o maddenin yanlı olduğunu söylemekte yeterli değildir. DMF içerdiği tespit edilen bir madde için ancak uzman görüşüyle yanlı olduğu sonucuna ulaşılabilir (Zumbo ve Gelin, 2005), dolayısıyla madde yanlılığı tespiti temelinde nitel bir değerlendirme gerektirir (Ellis & Raju, 2003;Furlow vd., 2009;Sireci & Allalouf, 2003).…”

“…While a biased item can definitely be said to contain DIF, the presence of DIF in an item is not enough to say that the item is biased. For an item that is found to contain DIF, it can only be concluded that it is biased with expert opinion (Zumbo & Gelin, 2005), so it requires a qualitative evaluation based on item bias detection (Ellis & Raju, 2003;Furlow et al, 2009;Sireci & Allalouf, 2003).…”

1.2.3 The Context and Why of Competence

“…It is important to understand how this culture affects the roles systems engineers have to fulfil in various organisations (Collins and Callahan 2009).The culture of an organisation can also affect a systems engineer in many ways, including specific personality characteristics or the way in which competence translates into performance. Domain-knowledge / industry-specific knowledge is extremely important for systems engineers to perform well.…”

“…The culture of an organisation in which systems engineers work will have a very definite influence on the competence characteristics that are required to perform well (Collins and Callahan 2009). It is important to understand how this culture affects the roles systems engineers have to fulfil in various organisations (Collins and Callahan 2009).The culture of an organisation can also affect a systems engineer in many ways, including specific personality characteristics or the way in which competence translates into performance.…”

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“…While a biased item can definitely be said to contain DIF, the presence of DIF in an item is not enough to say that the item is biased. For an item that is found to contain DIF, it can only be concluded that it is biased with expert opinion (Zumbo & Gelin, 2005), so it requires a qualitative evaluation based on item bias detection (Ellis & Raju, 2003;Furlow et al, 2009;Sireci & Allalouf, 2003).…”