Only as Strong as the Strongest Link: The Relative Contribution of Individual Team Member Proficiency in Configuration Ethan Brownell Department of Mechanical Engineering, Design Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Prior research has demonstrated how the average characteristics of a team impact team e-mail:
[email protected] performance. The relative contribution of team members has been largely ignored, espe- cially in the context of engineering design. In this work, a behavioral study was conducted Jonathan Cagan with 78 participants to uncover whether the most or least proficient member of a configu- Department of Mechanical Engineering, ration design team had a larger impact on overall performance. Proficiency is an individ- Carnegie Mellon University, ual’s ability to deal with a specific range of problem. It was found that a configuration Pittsburgh, PA 15213 design team is most dependent on the proficiency of its most proficient member. The most e-mail:
[email protected] proficient member had a significant positive effect on how quickly the team reached perfor- mance thresholds and the other members of the team were not found to have the same pos- Kenneth Kotovsky itive impact throughout the design study. Behavioral heuristics were found using hidden Department of Psychology, Markov modeling to capture the differences in behavior and design strategy between differ- Carnegie Mellon University, ent proficiency members. Results show that high proficiency and low proficiency team Pittsburgh, PA 15213 members exhibit different behavior, with the most proficient member’s behavior leading e-mail:
[email protected] to topologically simpler designs and other members adopting their designs, leading to the most proficient member driving the team design and thus the team performance.