Team Player Style Identification as a Means to Anticipate Challenges in Biomedical Engineering Capstone Design Teams

Introduction:: Self-directed teams are an integral part of many biomedical engineering capstone design courses, but tools to frame and incorporate the unique personalities and styles of individuals are not often applied. Effective integration of individual strengths and weaknesses to accomplish agreed upon goals and objectives is often handled reactively rather than proactively. It was our hypothesis that a better understanding of individual strengths and weaknesses may help biomedical engineering capstone design teams develop a more effective project plan and design deliverables. Toward this end, our instructors utilized the framework established by Glenn Parker in this book Teams and Team Players to help students identify the personal styles they are integrating across their team and to anticipate challenges that may arise (1). Project outcomes and student reflections will be analyzed to determine the effectiveness of this approach.


Materials and Methods:: We utilized two instruments by Parker, Team Player Survey and Team Development Survey. Over the last 4 academic years, the Team Player Survey was administered to students before capstone team formation and teams were asked to reflect on their anticipated strengths and weaknesses. Teams were formed primarily based on interest in project topics rather than balance of team player styles. In the most recent student cohort, team reflections were also collected at the culmination of the design project in the form of a retake of the Team Player Survey, the Team Development Survey, and a reflection on team efficacy. We collected data from 134 students across 4 cohorts of students from the 2020-2024 academic years. The demographics of the students across all cohorts were as follows: 55% Female, 45% male, 20% identified as underrepresented minorities, 16% as international students, and 8% as first generation students.


Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:: The Team Player Survey identifies four team player styles: contributor, collaborator, communicator, and challenger. Across our cohorts, the contributor style was the most common player style with 36% of students scoring highest in this category. The collaborator and challenger styles were identified as the primary style of 24% and 23% of students, respectively. The most uncommon player style was communicator with 10% of students scoring highest in this category. The final 7% of students scored equally in more than one category. In alignment with these results, the main challenges anticipated by teams were difficulties with communication and problem solving. We are assessing these projects with a rubric to see if the player styles contributed to the performance of the team, and if the challenges they anticipated were overcome in their final product. Ongoing end-of-year reflections from the most recent cohort of students identified communication, planning, and decision making as challenges experienced by their team, but these preliminary results also indicate that most students, 19 out of 28 respondents, characterized their communication as being effective, 21 out of 28 characterized their decision making as effective. Problem solving was identified as the most prevalent strength across teams in this cohort. Another finding from the survey results was that most individuals experienced a change in their player style compared to their results at the beginning of the year. Most students saw a more even distribution to their scores compared to the beginning of the year. Multiple students noted in their own remarks that they felt the long term nature of this project forced them to adjust to missing roles or needs in the group in order to complete the assignment successfully, and this was then supported by the shift in their player styles. Future analysis will seek to correlate the balance of player styles within teams with reflections and project outcomes. Our results thus far show that identification of team player styles may have led to proactive anticipation of communication and decision making challenges in our capstone design teams.


Acknowledgements (Optional): :

References (Optional): : 1. Parker, Glenn M. (1990). Team players and teamwork : the new competitive business strategy. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass Publishers.