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Abstract 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.
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Out in the Field Versus Inside in the Lab: A Comparison of Design Professionals’ Concept Screening Practices (DETC2019-97564)
Abstract Concept screening is one of the gatekeepers of innovation process and thus is considered a vital component of engineering design. Yet, we know very little about how decisions are made during concept screening or the factors that inform these decisions. This is due, in part, to the fact that most prior work on concept screening in engineering design has focused on student populations or on industry professionals in an experimental setting which is not indicative of the risks and consequences professionals face in their daily work—particularly when it comes to innovative design process. Thus, the current study was developed to identify how the environmental settings (i.e., experimental versus naturalistic) and the role of the professionals in the design process (i.e., idea generators versus executives) impacts the criteria used to screen design ideas. Two studies were conducted including a workshop study with 45 design professionals from two companies in an experimental setting and a participatory ethnographic study with seven design professionals from a small electromechanical company in a naturalistic setting. The results showed stark differences in the criteria used to screen ideas between naturalistic and experimental practices and between idea generators and company executives. In addition, the results showed differences in the factors considered during concept screening between naturalistic and experimental environments. These results are used to identify opportunities for tools and methods that encourage the consideration of creative ideas in the engineering design industry and encourage appropriate risk-taking in engineering design.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1351493
- PAR ID:
- 10209533
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Mechanical Design
- Volume:
- 143
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1050-0472
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in performance and learning across fields. While work in this field has suggested 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 to fostering psychological safety in a team environment is most important. This study provides the first attempt at answering this question through an empirical study with 53 engineering design student teams over the course of a 4- and 8-week design project. 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 not related to the number of ideas a team developed, it was positively related to the quality (goodness) of the ideas developed. In addition, while no relationship was found between psychological safety and ownership bias during concept screening, the results showed that teams with high psychological safety selected a higher percentage of their team members ideas.more » « less
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The capabilities of additive manufacturing (AM) open up designers’ solution space and enable them to build designs previously impossible through traditional manufacturing. To leverage AM, designers must not only generate creative ideas, but also propagate these ideas without discarding them in the early design stages. This emphasis on selecting creative ideas is particularly important in design for AM (DfAM), as ideas perceived as infeasible through the traditional design for manufacturing lens could now be feasible with AM. Several studies have discussed the role of DfAM in encouraging creative idea generation; however, there is a need to understand concept selection in DfAM. In this paper, we investigated the effect of two variations in DfAM education: 1) restrictive DfAM and 2) dual DfAM (opportunistic and restrictive) on students’ concept selection process. Specifically, we compared the creativity of the concepts generated by the students to the creativity of the concepts selected by them. Further, we performed qualitative analyses to explore the rationale provided by the students in making these design decisions. From the results, we see that teams from both educational groups select ideas of greater usefulness; however, only teams from the restrictive DfAM group select ideas of higher uniqueness and overall creativity. Further, we see that introducing students to opportunistic DfAM increases their emphasis on the complexity of designs when evaluating and selecting them. These results highlight the need for DfAM education to encourage AM designers to not just generate but also select creative ideas.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4047904
