Team Building in International Design Projects

Abstract

Since 1997 the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering in Delft has been running a third year Capstone Design project. In 2002 this project was extended by holding a design exercise in cooperation with Queen’s University in Belfast Northern Ireland. To improve the collaboration in these international teams a series of exercises was designed. As a result of these exercises a substantial reduction in communication problems and a much higher level of student and staff satisfaction has been noted.

Full text

TEAM BUILDING IN INTERNATIONAL DESIGN
PROJECTS
Gillian N. Saunders-Smits, Maartje van den Bogaard
& Erik de Graaff
Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands,
g.n.saunders@tudelft.nl, m.e.d.vandenbogaard@tudelft.nl,
e.degraaff@tudelft.nl
Abstract
Since 1997 the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering in Delft has been running a third
year Capstone Design project. In 2002 this project was extended by holding a design
exercise in cooperation with Queen’s University in Belfast Northern Ireland. To
improve the collaboration in these international teams a series of exercises was
designed. As a result of these exercises a substantial reduction in communication
problems and a much higher level of student and staff satisfaction has been noted.
Key words:
Projects; Teamwork; Inter-cultural cooperation; long distance communication
problems.
I INTRODUCTION
Teamwork in projects is an effective method to learn engineering (de Graaff &
Kolmos, 2007). This is why many engineering universities have implemented
different forms of team work in projects. However, most of the work in these
projects are characterized by the fact that the team members are generally all from
the same degree course at the same university, all staff is from the same university
and available locally and have some understanding of the common culture within
their institute. Even if some of the team members or supporting staff are not native
to the country they are assimilated well enough to overcome some of the cultural

problems. Also the lines of communication in these projects are short as face-to-face
contact is in principle available on a daily basis to overcome issues quickly.
Felder and Brent (2004) describe the intellectual development of young people in
four development stages:
1. Absolute Knowledge. All knowledge that matters is certain; all points of view
are either right or wrong. Authorities have The Truth and the responsibility to
communicate it; it is the student's job to memorize and repeat it.
2. Transitional Knowing. Some knowledge is certain and some is not. Authorities
have the responsibility to communicate the certainties, and the students must
make their own judgments regarding the uncertainties.
3. Independent Knowing. Most knowledge is uncertain. Students take responsibility
for their own learning rather than relying heavily on authorities or personal
feelings.
4. Contextual Knowing. All knowledge is contextual and individually constructed.
Students take responsibility for making judgments, acknowledging the need to
do so in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Felder and Brent (2004) point out that it is easier for students to climb the
intellectual development ladder in a student-centered instructional environment. The
instructional methods which they associate with this include:
• Inductive Learning in which students are confronted with problems before they
have enough knowledge and information to solve them. Variants of this include
problem-based instruction, guided inquiry, and just-in-time teaching.
• Active Learning in which individuals or small teams work on participatory
exercises - either in or out of (formally scheduled) classes.
• Cooperative Learning in which a team must work together to solve an entire
problem, but each team member must still remain knowledgeable about the
entire result.
Every student goes through the development described above with their own
individual style and pace. Part of that is dictated by the social and cultural
dimensions the individual brings to a project and part of that will be dictated by the
social and cultural dimensions of the institute the team exercises take place at.
So when two universities in two different countries although teaching the same
degree decide to organize a joint educational international team engineering design
project one will find that students on either side will be at different stages in their
development as described above. This article focuses on learning to collaborate in
teams using experiences gained with international design teams consisting of

aerospace engineering students from Delft University of Technology in the
Netherlands and Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
II IMPROVING TEAMWORK
Studies in educational sciences suggest that active learning formats are more
effective in relation to complex learning (Knight & Trowler, 2000). Also it has been
shown that academic progress in the ‘hard’ competencies is more effective using
project organized learning than in the classical lecture-based approach (1999,
Milgrom 2001; Powell & Weenk, 2003). However, working in design teams means
that an individual contribution to a team no longer just depends on their intellectual
ability to design but also to communicate their design to others and learn to depend
on others for other information and designs. It requires a different attitude.
Generally people tend to perform roles in teams based on the type of team they work
in and their personalities. Many methods have been developed to describe how
people work in teams. Most commonly known are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
and Belbin Team Roles.
Myers-Briggs type indicators indicate a person’s communication, problem solving
and decision making styles and the type of organization they prefer. They are based
on the psychological types by C.G. Jung and aim to make his theories useful to
people in every day life. It identifies a person’s basic preferences of each of the four
dichotomies specified or implicit in Jung’s theory this results in 16 distinctive
personality types from the interactions among the preferences.
Belbin (Belbin, 1993) argues that people naturally will have 3 or 4 dominant team
roles they can fulfil when working in a team. Belbin defines a team role as: “A
tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way”.
Among the 9 team roles Belbin defines one can find plant, coordinators, completer-
finishers etc. People can change team roles as they progress through their career.
Having an individual and their team members know one’s preferred role helps to
overcome problems in teams as people can understand where people are coming
from when discussion arises.
III INTERCULTURAL COOPERATION
Working in intercultural groups adds a new dimension to cooperation in student
teams. Hofstede (2004) in his standard work on culture in organisations describes
culture as mental software. Culture is the accumulation of patterns of thinking,

feeling and potential acting which people learn during their lifetime. However, a
person’s behaviour is only partially predetermined by her or his mental programs:
they have a basic ability to deviate from them, and to react in ways which are new,
creative, or unexpected. Culture is a collective phenomenon, because it is at least
partly shared with people who live or lived within the same social environment,
which is where it was learned. Culture is the collective programming of the mind
which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
People, who stay in other countries for a while, usually experience culture shock. A
foreigner cannot read the new culture and in a way, returns to the state of an infant.
He or she has to learn the simplest things over again. This usually leads to feelings
of distress, of helplessness and of hostility towards the new environment.
Intercultural encounters among groups also provoke group feelings. Contrary to
popular belief, intercultural contact among groups does not automatically breed
mutual understanding. It usually confirms each group in its own identity. People
tend to perceive members representing a different culture stereotypically. Such
stereotypes will even affect the perception of actual events. Language is another
barrier. The foreign partner must acquire the host culture language. Having to
express oneself in another language means learning to adopt someone else’s
reference frame. From this perspective, being bilingual is an asset in intercultural
communication. However, the non native speaker usually is limited in his ability to
express himself. Subtleties in word choice are easily lost and often lead to
misunderstandings. This more or less forces the non native speaker to use simpler
expressions than this person would use in his mother tongue. Along this line of
logic, Hofstede states that having English as one’s mother tongue is a liability rather
than an asset in inter cultural communication. Hofstede argues that messages in a
certain language do not necessarily survive the translation process into a different
language. Information is more than words; it has to fit into the cultural framework of
a language.
Hofstede (1991) defines 4 cultural dimensions which can be used to explain the
difference in working methods of people in general. These four dimensions are
listed in Table 1. We list the results for the Netherlands and Ireland. Although
Belfast is located in Northern Ireland and is included in the Hofstede scores for
Great Britain, our experience is that the Belfast students tend to relate more to
Ireland than to Great Britain. Therefore the Ireland results are represented here.
The Netherlands and Ireland have some things in common, as is reflected in similar
scores on some dimensions. Power distance is quite low in both countries. This is
indicative of a greater equality between societal levels. This orientation reinforces a
cooperative interaction across power levels and creates a more stable cultural

environment. Both countries score high on individualism, indicating more
individualistic attitudes and relatively loose bonds with others. People tend to be
more self-reliant and look out for themselves and their close family members. For
the Netherlands Hofstede specifies this dimension a little more closely: privacy is
considered the cultural norm and attempts at personal ingratiating may meet with
rebuff. Individual pride and respect are highly held values and degrading a person is
not well received, accepted, or appreciated.
Table 1:Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions
Cultural Dimension
Ireland
The Netherlands
World Average
Power Distance
28
38
55
Individualism vs.
Collectivism
70
80
43
Uncertainty Avoidance
35
53
64
Masculinity vs. Femininity
68
14
50
The countries score differently on the other dimensions. Ireland’s low ranking in the
Uncertainty Avoidance dimension represents a society that has fewer rules and does
not attempt to control all outcomes and results. It also has a greater level of tolerance
for a variety of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. The Netherlands score in the midrange
on this dimension, indicating a cultural tenancy to minimize or reduce the level of
uncertainty within the population by enacting rules, laws, policies, and regulations to
cover most any and all situations or circumstances. The most distinct difference
between the Ireland and the Netherlands is the score on the masculine-feminine
dimension. A low score on this value may be indicative of a low level of
differentiation and discrimination between genders and people in general. This low
ranking may also be displayed as a more openly nurturing society.
These dimensions help understand where potential problems in communication and
cooperation lie between the Belfast group and the Delft group. The acquisition of
intercultural communication abilities passes through three phases: awareness,
knowledge and skills. Awareness is the starts by recognizing one’s own mental
programming and the realization of the relativity of culture. One culture is not better
than another, it’s just different and probably for good reasons. Knowledge should
follow. This knowledge includes knowledge of symbols and rituals and of values
that underlie the culture. Skills are a combination of awareness, knowledge and
practice. Intercultural communication can be taught, according to Hofstede.
However, it demands for persons to have the ability to distance themselves from
their own believes and values. At the same time Hofstede’s theory does explain
why the teams easily bond at the start. This is due to their high individualism score.

Hofstede’s theory is presented to the students at the start of the project explaining
how their culture differs from one another. This usually leads to an active discussion
of sharing of situations and experiences and good laughs on the day and helps
students during the project to overcome conflict by taking a step back, reflecting on
why the conflict may have arisen in the first place and how they can go about
resolving it. This particularly useful as a lot of the conflict and misunderstanding is
caused by the challenges of long distance communication.
IV TEAMBUILDING BETWEEN DELFT AND BELFAST
The Faculty of Aerospace Engineering has been running a third year Capstone
Design project since 1997 (Brügemann et. al., 2005). In 2002 this project was
extended by holding a design exercise in cooperation with Queen’s University
Belfast Northern Ireland. It was whilst running that project that it was observed by
the path that there were distinct differences in style and pace in which students from
each side were working and communicating and also different expectations from
staff. Especially the long-distance communication tended to become problematic.
Conflicts tended to escalate and yet upon resolving were usually found to be based
on simple misunderstandings. Although students and staff from both sides were
together for short time during the exercise this did not appear to create enough
common understanding to overcome these problems.
Hence an 8 hour session was designed with the aim of team building in mind. This
session involved all students from both team and the session is not part of the
grading of the exercise so students have opportunity to be themselves. The
objectives of this session are to:
• get acquainted with each other
• hear each other’s expectations of the project
• get to know about each other’s culture
• become aware of the pitfalls in long-distance communication
• understand cultural differences with respect to working in teams
• understand the principle of working in teams
• discover their own natural team roles
To achieve these objections students are introducing themselves through several
“active” introduction games. This is then followed by a short session on cultural
differences using Hofstede’s theory (Hofstede, 1991). The long distance
communication problems are addressed in another session in which students are
communicating blindly as if they were apart. This is done by having students put
together small KNEXX models upon either written or oral instructions handed to

them from the unseen party who hold the original finished model. Also they are
asked to create a drawing based on only very simple verbal instructions from the
other side again without seeing the original. At the end of the session students are
asked to compare the model with the original and reflect on what went wrong and
how they may avoid similar communication problems over the email, chat and
telephone during the project. Next to leading to hilarious situations students find
extremely useful to see the effect of not communicating properly when it is done
over a distance.
The next half day of the session is more aimed towards team work. Students fill in a
Belbin self-assessment test to find out their team roles and then based on their team
roles, either ideal or deliberately skewed teams are put together who then undertake
a small “scrapheap challenge” based design task. At the end student evaluate
amongst themselves what happened during the process and how it related to their
team roles and cultural differences.
The whole team building session itself deliberately does not take place at University
but at the accommodation where all students (both the “home” and the “away”
students) are staying in the first week to take away some barriers. The learning about
each other’s culture is further enhanced by asking each national team to cook a
traditional meal during the first day. Next to that students are encouraged to mingle
as much as possible during the first week.
Overall students find the first week extremely useful although very tiring but very
worthwhile. The basis for a good cooperation is being laid. Recent experience
taught us that when a student misses the first week they have a hard time becoming
part of the team. It is the intention to continue with the current teambuilding
exercises in their current set-up.
V SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Understanding that young people go through a development process in different
stages and recognizing that those stages are gone through in different paces
depending on where one is being taught is important when collaborating on joint
educational team projects.
Taking into account the cultural dimensions of the team members as well as their
preferred team roles enhances the team’s collective understanding of each other and
results in a stronger team that is able to overcome or even avoid conflict and
miscommunications.

In the case of this particular educational project highlighted in this paper the result
of the teambuilding session is a substantial reduction in communication problems
and a much higher student and staff satisfaction level.
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