COMPUTATIONAL TEAM DYNAMICS AND CREATIVE TENSION BALANCE INDEX IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT TEAMS
Year: 2024
Editor: Grierson, Hilary; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon
Author: Sitarama, Shankaran; Agogino, Alice M
Series: E&PDE
Institution: University of California - Berkeley, United States of America
Page(s): 687 - 692
DOI number: 10.35199/EPDE.2024.116
ISBN: 978-1-912254-200
ISSN: 3005-4753
Abstract
Teamwork is an extremely effective pedagogical tool in engineering education. New Product Development (NPD) has been an effective strategy of companies to streamline and bring innovative products and solutions to customers. Thus, Engineering curriculum in many schools, some collaboratively with business schools, have brought NPD into the curriculum at graduate level. Teamwork is invariably used during instruction where students work in teams to come up with new products and solutions. They need to be creative as a group and generate a breadth of ideas and innovative solutions. They also need to be very efficient in their teamwork and work cohesively. The two distinctive traits of the teams, ideational creativity and effective teamworking introduce different creative tensions in the team members – ideational conflicts and tensions thereof, and relational conflicts and interpersonal tensions thereof. Teams that foster and effectively manage these creative tensions are successful and teams that are not, show poor team performance. In this paper we explore the network structural analysis of these tensions and propose a Creative Tension Balance (CTB) index along the lines of Degree of Balance in social networks that has the potential to highlight the successful (and unsuccessful) NPD teams. Team communication reflects the team dynamics among team members and hence the team’s emails are analyzed to generate the social networks for analysis. CTB index is computed and this is used to correlate to the overall NPD team performance. It is found to capture the signatures of high and low performing teams.
Keywords: New Product Development, NPD Teams, Team Creativity, Structural Balance, Team Dynamics