Composing diverse design teams: A simulation-based investigation on the role of personality traits and risk-taking attitudes on team empathy

Mohammad Alsager Alzayed, Scarlett R. Miller, Christopher McComb

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Empathy is known to help engineering designers develop a deeper understanding of the users' needs. However, prior research on individuals has identified that individual differences, such as personality traits and risk-taking attributes, could significantly impact designer's empathy. While this prior research provides a context for why individual differences may impact a designer's empathy, engineering design activities are typically deployed in teams, and thus a team-centered view of empathy is also needed. As such, the goal of the current study was to investigate the role of the diversity in personality traits and risk-taking attitudes in impacting team empathy in engineering design. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 13,482 teams generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique drawing upon a data set from 103 first-year engineering students. When composing highly empathic teams, the results suggest that we should compose teams that are diverse in the extraversion, openness, and neuroticism personality traits in addition to being diverse in ethical, health/safety and social risk-taking. This is important since empathy could allow design teams to deeply understand the needs of diverse users and subsequently solve those users' problems.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationDesign Computing and Cognition'20
PublisherSpringer International Publishing
Pages509-519
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9783030906252
ISBN (Print)9783030906245
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 24 2022

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Computer Science
  • General Psychology
  • General Engineering

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