Teamwork and Engineering Design Outcomes: Examining the Relationship Among Engineering Undergraduate Students

Global market demands have enforced engineers to develop innovative products to meet the technological development requirements. In-order to respond to the rapid development, engineering needs to have sufficient domain-specific knowledge that facilitates engineers to sustain competitiveness in the global market. Therefore, this study focuses on the challenges facing complex engineering organizations that require the efforts of creative teams to develop solutions to be used to replicate, sustain, and compete in the global market. Hence, this study attempts to investigate the teamwork and engineering among college-level engineering students. A correlational research design method with a purposive sampling strategy was employed. In this study, final year students in the College of Engineering at Colorado State University were selected for the study. The targeted sample consisted of sixty one voluntarily participated students. Teamwork was measured using team climate inventory (TCI) questionnaire and engineering design was measured using the senior design outcome score which represents student team achievement in engineering design. The finding of the study revealed that there is no significant relationship between teamwork and engineering design. Nevertheless, a statistically significant inter-correlations between construct in teamwork measured in TCI was obtained. Since, there was no attempt to conduct a practical observation in measuring teamwork performance that could be useful to detect students' cognitive behavior while they are solving the design problem in teams. Therefore, this provides a platform for future studies.