Team Role Adoption and Distribution in Engineering Project Meetings

Abstract

Team communication plays a vital role in engineering management, however, there is a paucity of work that examines how team roles emerge as a response to the communicative processes between participants. This research explored role adoption using qualitative methods comprising observations, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Five student teams doing final year projects at a university in New Zealand were observed during the academic year and then interviewed at the final stage of project completion. A number of team roles in the engineering context were identified for students and their supervisors: Explorer; Initiator; Facilitator; Active and Passive Information Provider; Outsider; Active and Passive Connector; Passive Collector; Arbitrator; Gatekeeper and Representative. Personal factors, such as social sensitivity, were correlated with the choice of team behaviour pattern. In addition, the team roles could be arranged in circular order to create a circumplex, the two axes of which were identified as Personal Agency/Communion and Social engagement/Social disengagement.

Communication Adjustment in Engineering Professional and Student Project Meetings

“…This observation implies that there is a progression or scale of roles, and hence it is natural to wonder how that might be arranged. The answer was previously reported by the present authors, based on the same data set [52]. The idea that emerges is of a circumplex of team roles; see Figure 7.…”

“…The current paper adopted the team role framework of [52]. We selected that inventory because it was designed specifically for engineering team project meetings, and because the team roles described there are informal in nature.…”

“…Furthermore, later additional roles were added by dividing the Information provider and Connector roles into two subcategories: active and passive. In addition, a circumplex of team roles arranged in a circular order was built to represent different aspects of communication patterns [52]. Define the task or group problem, suggest a method or process for accomplishing the task, provide a structure for the meeting, control the discussion processes.…”

“…Another question allowed them to identify all of the team roles that they thought described their own behaviour. The list of roles was from [52]. The results are shown in Table 4.…”

“…Team roles appeared to be very changeable. Roles have been shown to depend on parameters including personal characteristics, the team's goals, the addition of a new member group and even on the meeting's location [52].…”