Evaluating a Communication Framework for Team Effectiveness in a First-Year Design and Communication Course

Teams are the foundational building blocks of organizations, utilized to derive increasingly innovative solutions to complex problems in order to maintain a competitive market advantage. As such, the development of teamwork-based skills has been identified as a critical competency in engineering education required to prepare graduates for team-based projects in industry. While most engineering faculty have relatively effective methods in place to teach students’ technical skills (e.g., design fundamentals, problem analysis, etc.), it is sometimes challenging to find suitable tools to support communication and teamwork skill development. In response to this challenge, a collaborative partnership between the Psychology and Engineering department at the University of Calgary has yielded a theoretical-based communication technique applied to the engineering curriculum in order to enhance team effectiveness. While teams stimulate an innovative environment, the interdependence of individuals leads to an increased risk of conflict between members. Teams literature has identified three types of conflict that can arise: task conflict (TC), relationship conflict (RC) and process conflict (PC). Briefly, TC involves contrary perspectives and opinions about the task, RC refers to perceived interpersonal incompatibilities (i.e., personality clashes), and PC involves discordant views of roles, responsibilities, and/or task timelines. The aforementioned collaboration discovered an ideal conflict combination, or profile, linked to higher performance and positive team dynamics. Specifically, teams that engaged in task-related debates (i.e., high TC) while being unhindered by interpersonal tensions and logistical disagreements (i.e., low RC & PC) performed best. Thus, the goal of teamwork education might be advanced by encouraging this ideal conflict profile. Reaching this ideal profile may lie in a communication framework known as constructive controversy (CC). CC requires an openness to new perspectives, challenging of assumptions, and identification of optimal courses of action. Adapting this theoretical foundation, we created an easy to remember acronym, SUIT, which was the basis for a 90-minute training session administered to students. SUIT stands for Share, Understand, Integrate and Team decision. Specifically, teams are taught to share all unique information; understand information through critical questioning; integrate concepts to create innovative solutions; and agree on a team decision to implement a plan. The SUIT training session included an informational overview, followed by a structured role play, a decision making exercise, and team charters. We report on the results of a study evaluating the effectiveness of CC-based training in two cohorts of a first-year design and communication course. Contrasting 195 untrained (n=577 individuals) and 177 trained (n=566 individuals) teams found an approximately 20% increase in the number of teams categorizing themselves into the ideal conflict profile. Additionally, trained teams reported significantly lower competitive conflict management, higher perceived innovation efficacy, and higher collective team cohesion, strongly supporting the inclusion of the SUIT technique in the first-year curriculum to improve team functioning. Taken together, this evidence-based technique offers a valuable pedagogic foundation that can prepare students for the team-based work prevalent in organizations and holds potential as a universal application to various levels in engineering education.