Communication in engineering teams: personal interactions and role assignment

NEED – Communication is understood to be a key professional soft skill for engineers, but the components of communication are defined poorly. The literature on engineering communication is devoted primarily to formal information flows, the medium of communication, and technical documentation. There is comparatively little attention on the process, cognitive and organisational aspects. PURPOSE – The overall objective of this thesis was to develop a model of casual role assignment in the engineering context. Specifically, to identify how participants of engineering project meetings choose and acquire communication behavioural patterns. APPROACH – The research approach used mixed methods – a quantitative exploratory study followed by inductive qualitative analysis. The research consisted of four phases. First, a survey (questionnaire) was used to explore levels of satisfaction in communication of engineering team members (phase 1). Next, a new observational study method was developed to capture behavioural interactions within project meetings (phase 2). This is called the interaction diagram methodology. This methodology was then applied together with a structured interview, questionnaire, and Big Five personality test, to observational studies on student engineers (phase 3), and engineers in consulting firms (phase 4). FINDINGS – This thesis made several original contributions. First, a novel observational method was developed that provides a graphical representation of the interaction flow during meetings and a procedure to quickly analyse communication situations, identify group roles, and compare group activity at different meetings. Second, a new set of 12 team roles was identified for participants at project meetings. These were based on the literature, and further modified by our observations. We proposed that Social sensitivity and Personal satisfaction from communication interact, resulting in four broad levels of team outcome. The best is Team coherence, and the lesser outcomes are identified as Reluctant cohesiveness, Parallel compensation, and Behavioural divergence. Third, observations of team behaviour lead to a new insight into the process of team role assignment, and the creation of a new theoretical construct. This is the Team role circumplex. While circumplexes exist elsewhere in psychology and human development, there is no prior work in the area of engineering team roles. Key features of the new circumplex are the identification of two axes against which all the roles may be placed: Personal Agency/ Communion and Social engagement/ Social Disengagement. Fourth, communication at project meetings at university and in commercial engineering firms was compared and several distinctions in communication patterns were identified. For example, official positions consist mostly of predefined communications in industrial organisations, whereas at university participants have more freedom to choose their communication style. Furthermore, factors influencing project team communication (temporal and permanent) were determined and analysed. These factors included the communication setting of the meeting, team size, location inside meeting places, styles of supervision, and personality and demographic factors (gender differences in communication preferences of engineers). It was observed that participants of engineering project meetings adjusted their communication style to the behaviour of other people or to different communication settings. We supposed that this happens at three different levels: micro-level (grounding processes in conversation), mezzo-level (emotional and rational regulation) and macro-level (over an extended period of time)