Towards a Better Design Team Formation: A Review of Team Effectiveness Models and Possible Measurements of Design-Team Inputs, Processes, and Outputs

Cooperation among team members and good teamwork are essential to successfully complete design projects. As such, engineering students are expected to learn how to design and work effectively in a team. While, team-based project courses have been implemented in almost all engineering and engineering technology disciplines, achieving full contribution by all team members has been a persistent challenge in design and other engineering disciplines. This paper proposes a possible approach to establish guidelines to form design teams. In this paper, we first review team-effectiveness models. We then propose a design-team-effectiveness model, which will study associations between inputs, processes, and outputs in order to improve team processes and maximizes team performance through design team composition, work structure and improved team processes. Finally, we propose (1) measurements of design-team inputs, processes, and outputs, and (2) approaches to analyze associations among inputs, processes, and outputs.