Ethical Climate in Multidisciplinary Teams: Development of the TECS

One way to empirically evaluate team ethics is through ethical climate, which is defined as the procedures, policies, and practices in regard to moral or ethical concerns seen in the workplace. Peers and supervisors may influence individuals’ perceptions of ethics and moral situations, which will lead to a shared understanding of how the group should think about moral situations. The current researchers adapted the concept of ethical climate and brought it to interdisciplinary student teams. Teams on lengthy projects often face ethical problems, and the researchers developed a tool to address some of the unique considerations for ethics in interdisciplinary teams. Researchers developed the Team Ethical Climate Survey (TECS) to measure student team ethical climate. This instrument was adapted in part from the Ethical Climate Questionnaire, which includes scales of team interest, laws and codes, personal morality, rules and procedures, and self-interest scales. Authors also included care, interdisciplinary professional ethics, dealing with adversity, and shared decision-making scales. This paper presents the results of research to date on the ethics component of a collaborative effort involving team-based project programs at four universities funded by NSF under a Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science (TUES) Phase 2 grant. The following paper discusses the development of the TECS scale for interdisciplinary teams. More specifically, it focuses on an exploratory factor analysis conducted on TECS data in order to determine if the developed test scales emerged as factors with the student data. The data were collected for 521 undergraduate students involved with long-term (semester length or longer) interdisciplinary team projects. The TECS was administered at the midpoint of the semester. Results indicated that five factors emerged: team interest (alpha=.91), self-interest (alpha=.79), personal morality (alpha=.55), discussion of issues (alpha=.74), and differences in values (alpha=.71). The authors suggest future developments for the TECS and its use in the classroom. Additional findings and insights of interest are explored, and implications for engineering faculty and professionals are provided.