A Sea of Variations: Lessons Learned from Student Feedback about the Role of Trust in First-year Design Teams.

Teamwork is a fundamental part of the engineering profession; therefore, students majoring in engineering often work in teams. However, many dread the prospect of working on a team because they fear that their course grade will be adversely affected by the actions of other team members who cannot be trusted to support their own expectations of work product quality. This belief might have been formed through a prior experience, or may arise from suspicion about the unknown motives and actions of the other team members. While effective and appropriate team leadership is often identified by students as a major factor in team success, a more fundamental attribute of a successful team is trust among its members. This research study will identify and explore the role of trust in the dynamics of successful first year engineering design teams at our multidisciplinary university in the eastern United States. We are using a conceptual framework for the formation of trust in a team-based environment, which has been formed by studies of successful business, technical and sports teams. Despite differences in maturity and experience, engineering students have a lot in common with these older team members, because both groups are people with common traits of human nature. Our research questions are as follows: • How do team members describe manifestations of trust as a key factor in team success? • How can faculty remove barriers to the development of trust among members of student teams? End-of-semester surveys revealed that teams that exhibited a high level of trust often stated that the choice of design project did not affect the ability of the team to be successful, while teams with a low level of trust often blamed the choice of project for their difficulties factors. Successful teams also seem to exhibit a type of "team chemistry" whereby they enjoyed socializing as well as working together. The trust reinforces this type of compatibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]