Work in progress - assessing the impact of team dynamics on the design process

Successful teamwork relies on functions that team members assume throughout the life of a project. Task functions, critical to achieving product quality, focus on management activities aimed at the overall team goal. Operating functions, critical to maintaining team unity, focus on behaviors aimed at a team-centered approach to solving problems. Teams conduct a series of exercises in which half perform and the other half observe based on an observational technique developed by Eberhardt. Team operations follow phases described by Tuckman. We have discovered that undergraduate team performance relies on a balance of task and team functions. As the project progresses, men and women assumed different functions, probably due to differences in problem solving methods and technical exposure. Continuing this work in progress, we described teamwork exercises and statistics to identify functions that men and women assume. In addition, the paper offers a hypothesis for future research with respect to the impact that the functions men and women assume have on team decision making processes