Characteristics of Team Dynamics Influencing Success in Engineering Student Teams

Introducing team projects into the engineering curriculum and teaching good teaming skills is one of the challenges for today's engineering instructors. One of the challenging tasks is to form project team that can be successful. The question becomes: what information can be used to avoid bad teams. This article uses the experience of introducing real-world projects into the curriculum of the Department of Innovation in Chemical Technology of Kazan National Research Technological University to explore two key questions that might influence team success: 1) whether culture is a large factor in determining team success and 2) whether the diversity of styles of managing conflict influences success. In Kazan, there are two distinct cultures: Tatar which is predominantly Muslim and European Russian which is predominantly Orthodox. This situation offers an excellent opportunity to study these questions. Student teams were formed around projects according to their area of interest. During the project students were given three surveys from www.itpmetrics.com: on their personality and on their individual style of conflict management and a final survey on assessing the health and performance of the team. The approach in this article to analyze the results of these surveys to explore what factors had the most influence. All the students regardless of sex or culture showed a very high degree of integrative decision making. However, there are distinct differences in conflict management styles between the men and women of Tatar and Russian cultures. Having a high integrative style in the team leaders correlated to high team satisfaction. Surprisingly, the lack of contribution equity or the presence of personal conflict in the team had no to minimal influence on success.