Exploring Team Social Responsibility in Multidisciplinary Design Teams

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) provides organizations with ways of contributing to social well-being over and above profit maximization and legal obligations by considering wider stakeholders’ influences and interests. Similarly, we contend that teams within organizational contexts also have responsibilities and multilevel impacts to consider. This paper introduces our notion of team social responsibility (TSR) to enable us to examine how members perceive and enact their accountability to both internal and external stakeholders affected by their work. We focus on engineering design teams embedded within the EPICS service-learning program at Purdue University to explicate how TSR contributes to theory and practice in engineering education, particularly in preparing students for their professional endeavors beyond the classroom. Findings suggest tensions in student perceptions of self-vs-team responsibility, particularly in attributions of responsibilities or obligations to their project partners, to their team members through team dynamics and individual roles, and to multiple stakeholders. This study is unique in its goal of expanding work on social responsibility and moral decision-making, specifically in terms of engineering pedagogy.