Comparing Nominal and Interacting Sub-Structured Teams in an Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Task

Abstract

Abstract Teams are common throughout engineering practice and industry when solving complex, interdisciplinary problems. Previous works in engineering problem solving have studied the effectiveness of teams and individuals, showing that in some circumstances, individuals can outperform collaborative teams working on the same task. The current work extends these insights to novel team configurations in large interdisciplinary teams. In these team configurations, the meta-team as a whole can interact but the sub-teams within them may or may not. Here, team performance and process are studied within the context of a complex drone design and path-planning problem. Via a collaborative research platform called HyForm, communication and behavioral patterns can be tracked and analyzed throughout problem solving. This works shows that nominal sub-structured teams, where members work independently, outperform interacting sub-structured teams. While problem-solving actions remain consistent, communication patterns significantly differ, with nominal sub-structured teams communicating significantly less. Questionnaires reveal that the manager roles in the nominal sub-structured teams, which are more central in communication and information flow, experience a greater cognitive and workload burden than their counterparts in the interacting sub-structured teams. Overall, this work adds to the literature on nominal versus interacting problem-solving teams, extending the finding to larger, interdisciplinary teams.