TY - GEN
T1 - How engineering design students' psychological safety impacts team concept generation and screening practices
AU - Cole, Courtney
AU - Marhefka, Jacqueline
AU - Jablokow, Kathryn
AU - Mohammed, Susan
AU - Ritter, Sarah
AU - Miller, Scarlett
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1825830. Special thanks are given to Janice Gong in analyzing the reliability of the psychological safety scale, Katie Heininger in collecting data for Summer 2018, and Randall Doles in assisting with the coding of the MATLAB codes used to quantify the raw data. We also would like to thank our participants for their help in this project.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in performance and learning across fields. While work in this field has suggested that psychological safety can impact the creative process, particularly in the generation of ideas and in the discussions surrounding idea development, there has been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge we do not know when fostering psychological safety in a team environment is most important. This study provides the first attempt at answering this question through an empirical study with 53 engineering design student teams over the course of a 4- and 8-week design project. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of psychological safety on the number and quality (judged by goodness) of ideas generated. In addition, we explored the role of psychological safety on ownership bias and goodness in the concept screening process. The results of the study identified that while psychological safety was not related to the number of ideas a team developed, it was positively related to the quality (goodness) of the ideas developed. In addition, while no relationship was found between psychological safety and ownership bias during concept screening, the results showed that teams with high psychological safety selected a higher percentage of their team members ideas.
AB - Psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in performance and learning across fields. While work in this field has suggested that psychological safety can impact the creative process, particularly in the generation of ideas and in the discussions surrounding idea development, there has been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge we do not know when fostering psychological safety in a team environment is most important. This study provides the first attempt at answering this question through an empirical study with 53 engineering design student teams over the course of a 4- and 8-week design project. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of psychological safety on the number and quality (judged by goodness) of ideas generated. In addition, we explored the role of psychological safety on ownership bias and goodness in the concept screening process. The results of the study identified that while psychological safety was not related to the number of ideas a team developed, it was positively related to the quality (goodness) of the ideas developed. In addition, while no relationship was found between psychological safety and ownership bias during concept screening, the results showed that teams with high psychological safety selected a higher percentage of their team members ideas.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85096174209
T3 - Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference
BT - 32nd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM)
PB - American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
T2 - ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC-CIE 2020
Y2 - 17 August 2020 through 19 August 2020
ER -