UNLOCKING TEAM SUCCESS: THE POWER OF DIVERSITY IN ENGINEERING CAPSTONE TEAMS

Increasing diversity in engineering is a key priority due to the underrepresentation of women and the role of interdisciplinary teams on engineering success. In light of this, it is vital that we consider how to create inclusive teaming practices where individuals feel safe voicing their opinion and challenging team assumptions. The purpose of this paper was to examine the effect of team diversity (gender and interdisciplinarity) on perceived psychological safety through a study with 66 capstone engineering students. This study found that perceived psychological safety can be predicted by the individual’s gender and the team’s gender composition. Furthermore, results also show that adding information related to major can significantly improve the prediction of individual psychological safety. Finally, this study also explores other factors that might affect an individual’s psychological safety in a team and identifies coordination to be the most influential variable. Moreover, it was found that different groups of people are likely to experience more of or emphasize more on certain critical considerations (namely composition, communication, coordination, cooperation, conflict, cohesiveness, and creativity) when asked to describe positive or negative team interactions that affected their perceived psychological safety depending on their gender and team major composition. Study results show promise for further investigating the effect of different types of diversity and other factors on the psychological safety of individuals in the team.