Time for Teamwork

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Today’s younger engineers simply don’t want to work on teams. In fact, many students believe working alone will help them become expert engineers. At the same time, this lack of team spirit is the bane of managers who hire recent engineering graduates.

These are the findings of a study done by Paul Leonardi, an assistant professor of industrial engineering and management sciences at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science in Evanston, Ill. Leonardi worked with colleagues at the University of Colorado in Boulder to carry out the study, which was recently published in the Academy of Management Journal.

In carrying out his research Leonardi found the following scenarios are pretty commonplace at engineering schools throughout North America: Engineering students splitting up group projects so they don’t have to work together; a student bragging that he did the problem without following the directions but still got the right answer; another student bragging that he did the whole project in the hour before class.

So how to get young engineers interested in teamwork?

Leonardi’s answer may surprise some managers: Change the very idea of what it means to these young students to be an engineer. And get the media to follow suit.

"We need to put new kinds of stereotypes and images of what it means to be an engineer into the culture so students can reflect on those and think about changing their work practices to align with what we really want engineers to be," he said.

He also suggested students visit the real world via internship to see how real-world engineers actually carry out their jobs.

Do It Alone

"Industrial advisory boards are always saying engineers come to the workplace with good technical skills but they don’t work well on team projects," Leonardi said. "We wanted to know why. It’s not a lack of skill. Engineering students are smart people. So why aren’t they working in teams?"

The study, conducted over several years, included interviews with more than 130 undergraduate engineering students. The researchers also observed lab sessions and group projects in order to study the culture in which undergraduate engineers operate.

Leonardi and his team found by the time students entered engineering schools they already had an idea, formed from television programs and other media, of what an engineer should be.

"There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves," Leonardi said. "So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, ‘Am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am I not going to be as valuable?’ "

In other words, students believed that if they weren’t able to do a project alone they couldn’t consider themselves expert engineers.

Leonardi and his colleagues often saw groups splitting up work even when they’d specifically asked to work on it together at the same time.

The researchers also found that when professors gave out documents that detailed exactly how to build something, students would often throw them away and try to figure it out on their own. That’s another practice that stemmed from the stereotype that engineers should be able to solve problems on their own.

"Students would figure out workarounds and try to reintroduce more difficulty into the task," Leonardi said. "It was a mark of distinction not to follow the task."

The workarounds were often partnered with what researchers called delayed initiation—a fancy term for procrastination. But the researchers found students didn’t procrastinate because they were lazy; they procrastinated to prove that they could figure out the problem in a short period of time.

That is, they could boast about putting off the problem and then solving it quickly, another skill they saw as particular to successful engineers.

"All these practices were very counterproductive to working in a team," Leonardi said.

Students would continually justify their actions by telling researchers, "That’s just what engineers do." The continued justification made the practices seem natural, Leonardi said.

Professional societies often state that engineering schools should put more team-based projects into the curriculum. But, after studying his findings, Leonardi argued that team-based assignments aren’t enough.

"It’s important for organizations to get involved with engineering education, to provide internships and co-op opportunities because it allows students to see early on other images of engineering so they can see that there are images of engineers out there other than the expert loner," he said.

Jean Thilmany, Associate Editor, Mechanical Engineering.

Leonardi’s answer may surprise some managers: Change the very idea of what it means to these young students to be an engineer. And get the media to follow suit.

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