A Team Formation Framework for Managing Diversity in Multidisciplinary Engineering Project

Abstract

Team formation is one of the essential elements in constructing effective teamwork of any team size that requires different skill sets. Diversity in team encourages students to challenge and compete with one another while searching for new ideas, which in turn can lead to a better team performance. In a well-functioning diverse teams, the students who performed poorly may gain benefit by observing how excellent students approach the assignments. They may also benefit by getting advice and assistance from the excellent students. Studies have shown that Malaysian university graduates lack of team skills. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for forming a diverse multidisciplinary team among engineering undergraduates based on selected criteria such as individual personality type, gender, and other relevant demographic information. The proposed framework can also be used to design an automated team-formation system based on the identified metrics. The purpose of the framework is to consolidate the existing team formation literature, and to develop and test interventions for maximizing individual member and team performance as a whole that makes an effective team. For this study, a multidisciplinary approach was used where first year engineering students from three different faculties, namely Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FKE), Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (FKM), and Faculty of Biosciences and Medical Engineering (FBME) at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) worked on an innovation project using the Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate (CDIO) framework. Keirsey Temperament Sorter was used as an instrument to identify an individual's personality type.