An Examination of Individual Attributes and their Impact on Team Creative Design Outputs

While teaming is a vital component of engineering, it is important to remember that there is no team without individuals, and individual behavior can drive team outputs. One of the individual factors that may manifest itself at the team level is individual risk-taking attitudes, which can be impacted by personality and preferences for creativity. However, a gap exists in research on the impact of team composition in these factors on creative outputs, as previous research has found that team composition plays a key role in team performance. The current work builds upon a previous work, and was developed to examine how the diversity of team personality and preferences for creativity impact the likelihood of concept screening events falling into one of the four categories of Signal Detection Theory. The results of this study show that for the population studied here, no team with the same composition was able to obtain ‘‘good’’ decisions in all four categories (increased hit, decreased Type I error, decreased Type II error, increased correct rejections). The team compositions studied here were only related to the likelihood of making good decisions in two or three of the four categories. This serves as empirical evidence supporting the complicated nature of the impact of team composition and provides some support for educators and instructors for a better understanding of team creative performance.