IntroductionAlthough time pressure is known to undermine performance and work quality, its antecedents remain underexplored. We examine distal and proximal antecedents, along with contextual moderators, in supervisor-supervisee dyads.MethodsParticipants included 21 supervisors and 365 supervisees from the Chinese banking industry. Survey data were analyzed using polynomial regression and hierarchical linear modeling.ResultsComplementary temporal fit was associated with greater temporal self-efficacy. However, temporal self-efficacy did not directly reduce time pressure. Its negative effect on time pressure highly depends on the context, being attenuated when coordinative complexity was high and timelines were clear.DiscussionTime pressure emerges from nuanced antecedents that depend on contextual moderators. These findings highlight the joint role of supervisor-supervisee dyadic temporal fit and work context in shaping time pressure.

Granting agencies often require cross-disciplinary team composition to be competitive for funding. However, to what extent do research teams have cross-disciplinary authorships after they win an award, given that grants are not contracts? This mixed-method study examined the degree to which cross-disciplinary composition translated into cross-disciplinary authorship in grant-funded teams and the factors motivating cross-disciplinary collaboration. We found that after receiving a grant award, nearly 90% of investigators chose to collaborate across disciplines, with 80% working with researchers from fields very different from their own. Interviews uncovered facilitators and hindrances to continued collaboration. Facilitators included strong interpersonal relationships, shared goals, and openness to new ideas. Common hindrances involved funding shortages and limited face-to-face interactions. What defined success in cross-disciplinary collaboration were not only research outputs but learning opportunities, highlighting the intangible benefits of cross-disciplinary research. Researchers stressed the importance of integration and resource availability for deeper collaboration across disciplines.

Utilizing advanced machinery in team environments often necessitates reliance on a leader, or “operator,” who is in charge of interfacing with technology directly on the team’s behalf. This is particularly evident in modern military missions, where teams depend on operators of robotic machinery to safely navigate dangerous tasks or hazardous terrain. The present work is part of a larger study on integrating a semi-autonomous quadruped robot into military training exercises. This analysis focused on how trust in an operator controlling Spot influenced different aspects of human-robot interaction (HRI) among the team. Operator trust was found to be positively correlated with positive perceptions of the robot, trust in and reliance on the robot, and willingness to use the robot for future exercises. Improving operator trust, thereby shifting the focus to human-human interaction, may prove an effective avenue for bolstering confidence in robotic systems.

Trust remains a critical focus within human-robot interaction research with the benefits of trust including increased task performance. There is a growing body of literature that suggests that the perceived characteristics of robots play a role in trust; however, less is known about the relationship between trust and the perceived characteristics of an autonomous robot teammate in an applied military setting. We investigated the relationship between the perceived characteristics of a robot teammate and the level of trust in the robot by equipping United States Military Academy (USMA) cadets with a pseudo-autonomous quadrupedal robot teammate during field training. We found that the likability, animacy, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety of the robot positively correlated with trust.

Social class inequality is growing at a record pace. What happens when individuals from different social classes work on the same team? We examined the direct and moderating influences of social class as an underexplored form of diversity on team viability in 132 student project teams. Guided by an overarching framework from the team diversity literature, we explored perspective taking and conflict resolution norms as moderators that may safeguard against the negative effects of social class diversity on team viability. As predicted, teams with a mix of higher and lower social class members who were less able to see their teammates' points of view or develop open conflict resolution norms reported less desire to work together in the future. Given these promising results and the ongoing importance of social class inequality in organizations, future research should continue to examine social class in a team context.

For cross-disciplinary teams to be effective, what knowledge should be shared and what knowledge should remain unique to individual team members? We adopted a mixed-method approach using a sample of grant-funded teams composed of principal and co-principal investigators of diverse disciplines. Interviewees and survey respondents especially favored knowledge similarity over uniqueness for team vision and teamwork, but less preference for convergence emerged for research outcomes and research content (theory, operational details of methodology, analysis). Moreover, more team knowledge convergence was associated with higher perceived collaboration satisfaction and trended in the direction of more grants, publications, and conference presentations.

Action-state orientation (ASO) is a self-regulatory motivational difference reflecting the extent to which individuals will initiate action, avoid distractions, and persist in the face of obstacles or failure. Although differences in action- and state-oriented members are likely to harm team outcomes, the impact of ASO diversity on team functioning has not been explored. Therefore, this study examined the effects of ASO diversity on team relationship conflict, as well as the moderating effects of transition processes and interpersonal processes. Results indicated that teams with high levels of ASO diversity (i.e., having a mixture of action-oriented and state-oriented members) reported higher levels of relationship conflict. Further, interpersonal processes, but not transition processes, moderated the ASO diversity-relationship conflict link. These results draw attention to a novel form of team diversity that increases interpersonal disagreement and emotional friction between members as well as identify a means of mitigating these effects through processes that facilitate confidence building, affect management, and conflict resolution.

Increasing diversity in engineering is a key priority due to the underrepresentation of women and the role of interdisciplinary teams on engineering success. In light of this, it is vital that we consider how to create inclusive teaming practices where individuals feel safe voicing their opinion and challenging team assumptions. The purpose of this paper was to examine the effect of team diversity (gender and interdisciplinarity) on perceived psychological safety through a study with 66 capstone engineering students. This study found that perceived psychological safety can be predicted by the individual’s gender and the team’s gender composition. Furthermore, results also show that adding information related to major can significantly improve the prediction of individual psychological safety. Finally, this study also explores other factors that might affect an individual’s psychological safety in a team and identifies coordination to be the most influential variable. Moreover, it was found that different groups of people are likely to experience more of or emphasize more on certain critical considerations (namely composition, communication, coordination, cooperation, conflict, cohesiveness, and creativity) when asked to describe positive or negative team interactions that affected their perceived psychological safety depending on their gender and team major composition. Study results show promise for further investigating the effect of different types of diversity and other factors on the psychological safety of individuals in the team.

Thomas Kuhn revolutionized how we think of scientific discovery and innovation when he identified that scientific change can occur on a continuum from incremental developments to drastic change in the form of a paradigm shift. In engineering design, both types of scientific change are critical when exploring the solution space. This study investigates this gap under a psychological safety lens through an empirical study with 64 engineering design student teams over the course of a 4- and 8-week design project. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of cognitive style using KAI scores, derived from Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation (A-I) theory, on the paradigm-relatedness of ideas generated by individuals and teams. Our results identify that cognitive style may not have a direct relationship to the paradigm of ideas an individual generates, or a team selects and develops. Similarly, both individual perceptions and team psychological safety do not predict the paradigm of ideas generated or selected in a team. The results instead identify that the availability of ideas in each paradigm is the primary driver for teams selecting a higher ratio of these ideas during concept screening. These results highlight that cognitive style at the individual and team levels may not be of paramount importance for developing paradigm-challenging ideas, and that teams should instead turn their focus to developing strategies to generate more ideas within the paradigm that fits best with the desired goals of the design tasks.

This paper investigates team psychological safety (N = 34 teams) in a synchronous online engineering design class spanning 4 weeks. While work in this field has suggested that psychological safety in virtual teams can facilitate knowledge-sharing, trust among teams, and overall performance, there have been limited investigations of the longitudinal trajectory of psychological safety, when the construct stabilizes in a virtual environment, and what factors impact the building of psychological safety in virtual teams.

Research on psychological safety has been growing in recent years due to its role in promoting creativity and innovation, among other items. This is because teams with high levels of psychological safety feel safe to express ideas and opinions. While we are becoming more aware of the importance of psychological safety in teaming, there is limited evidence in how to facilitate or build it within teams, particularly in an educational context. This paper was developed to respond to this research void by identifying the impact of teaming interventions aimed at improving psychological safety in engineering design student teams. Specifically, we studied two cohorts of students in a cornerstone design class (N = 414 students), one who received a series of video interventions and introduced role playing (intervention) and one who did not (control). These role assignments - referred to as the Lenses of Psychologically Safety - were created to promote key leadership attributes that have been shown to be crucial in facilitating psychologically safe teams. To compare the utility of the intervention, Psychological Safety was gathered at 5 key time points of a multi-week design project. The results identified three key findings. First, the interventions were successful in increasing psychological safety in engineering teams. In addition, the results indicated the utility of the Lenses of Psychological Safety throughout the design process. Finally, the results identified that groups who used these lenses had higher perceptions of Psychological Safety in their teams. Overall, these results indicated that psychological safety can be improved in engineering education through the intervention methods described within.

Although teamwork is being integrated throughout engineering education because of the perceived benefits of teams, the construct of psychological safety has been largely ignored in engineering research. This omission is unfortunate because psychological safety reflects collective perceptions about how comfortable team members feel in sharing their perspectives, and it has been found to positively impact team performance in samples outside of engineering. While prior research has indicated that psychological safety is positively related to team performance and outcomes, research related to psychological safety in engineering teams is less established. There is also a lack of comprehensive methodologies that capture the dynamic changes that occur throughout the design process and at each time point. In light of this, the goal of the current study was to understand how psychological safety might be measured practically and reliably in engineering student teams over time. In addition, we sought to identify factors that impact the building and waning of psychological safety in these teams over time. This was accomplished through a study with 260 engineering students in 68 teams in a first-year engineering design class. The psychological safety of the teams was captured for each team over five time points over the course of a semester long design project. The results of this study provide some of the first evidence on the reliability of psychological safety in engineering teams and offer insights as to how to support and improve psychological safety.

Psychological safety and turn-taking have both been listed as key factors needed for collaboration in teams to emerge. Specifically, prior work has shown that increased communication in teams can lead to high psychological safety. Prior work on turn-taking as a measure of communication has mostly focused on its inclusivity in a team rather than its frequency. While the gender composition of the team can impact both participation as well as team psychological safety, there is a lack of research at the individual level. As such, this study provides the first attempt at connecting turn-taking, gender, and psychological safety through the analysis of members of fifteen engineering design student teams during the concept generation stage of their project. Specifically, we gathered video data to study how the number of turns and self-turns in a team impact psychological safety at both the individual and the team levels. We also examined how gender impacts participation and individual perceptions of psychological safety. The results found that turns and self-turns have a significant positive impact on an individual’s perception of the team’s psychological safety. However, no such relationship was found at the team level, indicating that there may be additional underlying factors in team level psychological safety. While we found that gender did not impact individual turn-taking, it did affect an individual’s perception of their psychological safety. These results provide quantitative evidence of the role of team communication on psychological safety.

There is growing evidence on the importance of psychological safety, or how comfortable participants feel in sharing their opinions and ideas in a team, in engineering team performance. However, how to support it in engineering student teams has yet to be explored. The goal of this study was to investigate whether a video intervention with assigned roles could foster psychological safety in student engineering teams. In addition, we sought to explore the impact of the frequency of the videos and the utility of the roles on the self-efficacy of students and the perceived psychological safety of the team. Specifically, this study introduces video interventions and the four lenses of psychological safety (Turn-Taking Equalizer, Point of View Shifter, Affirmation Advocate, and Creativity Promoter), and seeks to determine their effectiveness at increasing psychological safety self-efficacy and individual levels of psychological safety. A pilot study was completed with 54 participants (36 males, 17 females, 1 non-binary/third gender) enrolled in a cornerstone engineering design course. Over 10 weeks, data was collected at 5 time points. The results present four key findings. Most notably, 1) a video educating all students about psychological safety in general was effective in improving psychological safety self-efficacy and students retained this information to the end of the project;2) intervention groups taught to use the four lenses did not have a statistically significant higher level of psychological safety than nonintervention groups; and 3) intervention groups perceived the use of the lenses to increase psychological safety. These results provide a baseline understanding that is needed to support psychological safety including: when to intervene, how to intervene, and how frequently to intervene.

While psychological safety is a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in team performance across fields that can positively impact the creative process, there have been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge, we do not know whether fostering psychological safety in a team environment is important for specific engineering design outputs from concept generation and screening practices. This study provides one of the first attempts at addressing this research gap through an empirical study with 69 engineering design student teams over the course of 4- and 8-week design projects. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of psychological safety on the number and quality (judged by goodness) of ideas generated. In addition, we explored the role of psychological safety on ownership bias and goodness in the concept screening process. The results of the study identified that while psychological safety was negatively related to the number of ideas a team developed, it was positively related to the quality (goodness) of the ideas developed. This result indicates that while psychological safety may not increase team productivity in terms of the number of ideas produced, it may impact team effectiveness in coming up with viable candidate ideas to move forward in the design process. In addition, there was no relationship between psychological safety and ownership bias during concept screening. These findings provide quantitative evidence on the role of psychological safety on engineering team idea production and identify areas for further study.

Improving team interactions in engineering to model gender inclusivity has been at the forefront of many initiatives in both academia and industry. However, there has been limited evidence on the impact of gender-diverse teams on psychological safety. This is important because psychological safety has been shown to be a key facet for the development of innovative ideas, and has also been shown to be a cornerstone of effective teamwork. But how does the gender diversity of a team impact the development of psychological safety? The current study was developed to explore just this through an empirical study with 38 engineering design student teams over the course of an 8-week design project. These teams were designed to be half heterogeneous (either half-male and half-female, or majority male) or other half homogeneous (all male). We captured psychological safety at five time points between the homogenous and heterogenous teams and also explored individual dichotomous (peer-review) ratings of psychological safety at the end of the project. Results indicated that there was no difference in psychological safety between gender homogenous and heterogenous teams. However, females perceived themselves as more psychologically safe with other female team members compared to their ratings of male team members. Females also perceived themselves to be less psychologically safe with male team members compared to male ratings of female team members, indicating a discrepancy in perceptions between genders. These results point to the need to further explore the role of minoritized groups in psychological safety research and to explore how this effect presents itself (or is covered up) at the team level.

A surprising and ironic lack of shared cognition currently exists about team cognition, including how to define the construct, organize the research, and integrate across multiple disjointed constructs. In response to team cognition at a critical crossroad, we provide a comprehensive on the concept of team cognition at a critical crossroad, we provide a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary review, highlighting similarities and differences between constructs and integrating across constructs. Specifically, we synthesize 10 disjointed team cognition constructs into three overarching dimensions. By establishing a common vocabulary to describe team cognition, the three-dimensional framework enhances our ability to evaluate accumulated research, recognize points of intersection, and identify key research gaps. Whereas the three-dimensional framework unites the team cognition literature conceptually, we see networks as a powerful tool to unite the team cognition literature methodologically. Networks neatly merge the structure and content of team cognition, multiple knowledge domains, the interrelationship between cognitive processes and cognitive representations, and the measurement capability to answer new and sophisticated research questions. By providing conceptual integration within a network configuration, we offer theoretical and measurement redirection to hasten the next frontier of team cognition research.

Nearly 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn revolutionized how we think of scientific discovery and innovation when he identified that scientific change can occur in incremental developments that improve upon existing solutions, or it can occur as drastic change in the form of a paradigm shift. In engineering design, both types of scientific change are critical when exploring the solution space. However, most methods of examining design outputs look at whether an idea is creative or not and not the type of creativity that is deployed or if we can predict what types of individuals or teams is more likely to develop a paradigm-shifting idea. Without knowing how to identify who will generate ideas that fit a certain paradigm, we do not know how to build teams that can develop ideas that better explore the solution space. This study provides the first attempt at answering this question through an empirical study with 60 engineering design student teams over the course of a 4- and 8-week design project. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of cognitive style using KAI score, derived from Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation (A-I) theory, on the paradigm-relatedness of ideas generated by individuals and teams. We also sought to investigate the role of crowdsourcing for measuring the paradigm-relatedness of design solutions. The results showed that KAI was positively related to a greater likelihood of an individual’s idea being categorized as paradigm-breaking. In addition, the team KAI diversity was also linked to a greater likelihood of teams’ ideas being categorized as paradigm-challenging. Finally, the results support the use of crowdsourcing for measuring the paradigm-relatedness of design solutions.

Temporal challenges are not only contextual in nature but manifest internally in teams when members enter the team with different temporal orientations (e.g., time urgency and pacing style). Researchers have demonstrated that temporal diversity has important implications for key team outcomes (performance, timeliness, and team conflict) across a range of samples and countries. Unfortunately, the practical implications of this research have yet to be unpacked. We respond to this need by developing an approach to translate temporal diversity research studies into actionable, evidence-based team interventions. Because journal articles are often deficient on actionable steps, whereas practitioner-friendly outlets tend to be deficient on scientific rigor, incorporating both criteria necessitates merging these literatures. Specifically, we delineate four main steps: (1) identify significant moderators, (2) match the moderators to scientifically based interventions, (3) design intervention tools with specific, actionable procedures, and (4) evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention tools by designing research studies. We believe the process we outline to marry actionable and evidence-based benchmarks is applicable to other research domains in team science beyond temporal research. It is our hope that this research will be a catalyst for further exploration of interventions that can help team members navigate temporal differences.