Effects of Locus of Control Personality Trait on Team Performance in Cooperative Engineering Design Tasks

Author(s):  
Alkım Z. Avşar ◽  
Paul T. Grogan

Abstract Teams in engineering design tackle problems that exceed the abilities of individuals. Improved understanding of how personality traits influence human behaviors and interaction may help create new methods and tools to support design teams. This paper seeks to understand how the Locus of Control (LOC) personality trait influences designer behaviors and team performance. A designer experiment studies 12 participant pairs controlled for categorical LOC pairing factors (internal-internal, external-external, and internal-external). Each design team completes six simplified cooperative parameter design tasks to minimize completion time, yielding 72 total data points. Regression analysis shows LOC pairing affects team efficiency in agreement with literature outside engineering design: diverse LOC traits reduce design efficiency while similarity increases team effectiveness. Results contribute to an explanatory hypothesis that LOC pairing influences designer behaviors related to action effectiveness which, subsequently, affects team performance outcomes.

2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
P Jagodzinski ◽  
F.J.M Reid ◽  
P Culverhouse ◽  
R Parsons ◽  
I Phillips

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher McComb ◽  
Jonathan Cagan ◽  
Kenneth Kotovsky

Although insights uncovered by design cognition are often utilized to develop the methods used by human designers, using such insights to inform computational methodologies also has the potential to improve the performance of design algorithms. This paper uses insights from research on design cognition and design teams to inform a better simulated annealing search algorithm. Simulated annealing has already been established as a model of individual problem solving. This paper introduces the Heterogeneous Simulated Annealing Team (HSAT) algorithm, a multi-agent simulated annealing algorithm. Each agent controls an adaptive annealing schedule, allowing the team develop heterogeneous search strategies. Such diversity is a natural part of engineering design, and boosts performance in other multi-agent algorithms. Further, interaction between agents in HSAT is structured to mimic interaction between members of a design team. Performance is compared to several other simulated annealing algorithms, a random search algorithm, and a gradient-based algorithm. Compared to other algorithms, the team-based HSAT algorithm returns better average results with lower variance.


2006 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 603-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Barbuto ◽  
Liezel Barbuto ◽  
Piet De La Rey ◽  
Adre B. Boshoff ◽  
Ye Xu

The predictors of objectively measured sales performance were assessed with 245 sales representatives from a large South African life insurance company. Sales representatives completed measures of their locus of control, entrepreneurial attitudes, biographical history, and performance was assessed from company records of sales, net commissions earned, and lapse ratios. The nature of employment contract, job status, and race explained significant differences in performance outcomes. The predictive nature of locus of control and entrepreneurial attitudes for performance outcomes was tested using structural equation modeling procedures, with limited validity. The implications for research and practice are also discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 452-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean A. Newman ◽  
Robert C. Ford ◽  
Greg W. Marshall

Based on a study of leader communication effectiveness conducted in a large human resource outsourcing firm, this article reports how virtual team members’ perceptions of their leaders’ effective use of communication tools and techniques affect team performance outcomes. The study also investigates the role that trust plays in moderating the relationship between virtual team members’ perceptions of their leaders’ effective use of communication and team performance. Analysis of 458 responses from 68 teams found a positive relationship between virtual team members’ perceptions of leaders’ effective use of communications and team members’ perception of their team’s performance. The study also found that trust strengthens the relationship between perceived leader communication effectiveness and team performance results. Last, the study also revealed serious organizational alignment issues between what team members perceived to be effective leader communication, their perception of team performance outcomes, and the organizations performance measured by a balanced scorecard.


Author(s):  
Ramon Costa ◽  
Durward K. Sobek

Iteration in design has different meanings, ranging from simple task repetition to heuristic reasoning processes. Determining the need to iterate is important to improve the design process on cost, time, and quality, but currently there is no categorization of iterations conducive to this goal. After exploring the possible causes and attempts to address them, we propose to classify iterations as rework, design, or behavioral. This framework suggests that design teams should try to eliminate rework iterations, perform design iterations without skipping abstraction levels, and do behavioral iterations in parallel.


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