An Exploration of the Impact of Psychological Safety in Engineering Design Student Teams
Open Access
- Author:
- Cole, Courtney
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Steven Landry, Program Head/Chair
Scarlett Miller, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Kathryn Jablokow, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Yiqi Zhang, Major Field Member
Susan Simkins, Outside Unit & Field Member
Jessica Menold, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- psychological safety
engineering design
engineering design teams
industrial engineering
creativity
cognitive style
gender
innovation
idea goodness
idea fluency
concept generation
concept selection
concept screening
idea generation
prototyping
functional prototype
beta prototype
communication
team
teamwork
outputs
performance
productivity
effectiveness - Abstract:
- In the last two decades, psychological safety in teams has grown in importance, and even more so in the last ten years thanks to Google’s “Project Aristotle.” Specifically, psychological safety is a team construct that describes to what extent the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in performance and learning across various fields. While prior work outside of engineering suggests that psychological safety can impact the creative process, particularly in the generation of ideas and in the discussions surrounding idea development, there has been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge, we do not know when in the engineering design process fostering psychological safety in a team environment is most important. Furthermore, there is lack of understanding as to what factors within an engineering design team may contribute to lower psychological safety such as surface-level diversity (i.e., gender). Thus, educators in engineering should be concerned about how psychological safety may have an impact on design outputs, as well as how it may be influenced by other traits, such as cognitive style, or an individual’s preferred way of coming up with ideas to solve problems (i.e., producing more incrementally or radically different solutions). Additionally, it is important to consider team composition from the perspectives of gender, as some groups may be more at risk for facing adversity that impairs their ability to thrive within their teams. Without an understanding of the role of psychological safety and how it may impact team performance and team dynamics, engineering educators will not be able to devise or assess interventions geared towards the development of psychological safety in teams. The objective of this dissertation was to identify the impact of psychological safety in engineering design student teams and the factors underlying its establishment. Specifically, through the proposed plan, this dissertation addressed the following goals: (1) understand how psychological safety impacts the fluency and goodness of design ideas generated, and the underlying role of idea ownership; (2) understand how variations in individual and team deep-level diversity (cognitive style) impact the paradigm-relatedness of ideas from concept generation, prototypes, and the final designs are related, and (3) determine how gender impacts the establishment, building, and maintenance of psychologically safe environments during a multi-week engineering design team project. The results from this research contributes to an understanding of psychological safety in engineering design teams and how to foster it to promote better team performance. The knowledge gained from this dissertation also provides the groundwork for developing future specialized intervention methods to address team issues and to foster psychological safety.