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Assessing Team Effectiveness: Comparing Peer-Evaluations to a Team Effectiveness Instrument Keywords: Team Effectiveness, CFA, Peer-Evaluation

Abstract Engineering education continually increases the use of academic teams for active and cooperative learning. According to ABET, engineering students should be able to function effectively within a multidisciplinary team. Moreover, current engineering practice in industry requires effective team cooperation. Thus being able to function in a multidisciplinary team entails both academic and industrial importance.

Team effectiveness has been studied extensively in industrial settings. Many factors that contribute to the team effectiveness have been studied thoroughly. Factors including interdependency, potency, and goal setting have been identified as highly related with team effectiveness.

This paper addresses the validity of our team effectiveness scale through cross-validation process. In order to do so, we developed a 9-item Likert self-assessment peer evaluation scale to measure how individual evaluate their peer teammates as effective or not. Psychometric analysis results are used to demonstrate reliability of the data sets. Cronbach’s coefficient alpha is higher than .90 for both the peer evaluation scale and the team effectiveness scale. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) is used to verify the theoretical structure of the peer evaluation and team effectiveness factors using LISREL. CFA results show there is a positive correlation between the team effectiveness measured by the two scales, thus we concluded that our team effectiveness instrument proved to be valid through the cross-validation process.

Background The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) [1] with Engineering Criteria 2000 started a movement to advance the current curriculum and pedagogy of engineering education. According to ABET guidelines, students graduating from engineering programs should not only have strong traditional engineering knowledge in fundamental areas such as mathematics and science, but should also be able to work effectively in a multidisciplinary environment in multicultural teams.

Campion, Medsker, and Higgs [2] define team effectiveness in terms of productivity, employee and customer satisfaction and manager judgments. Based on this hypothesis, they found that potency and interdependency are among factors described as important attributes of an effective team through the study of real teams in the field. Guzzo [3] defines team effectiveness through group-produced outputs and the capability to perform well in the future. O’Leary-Kelly, et al. [10] proposed that goal setting has a strong effect on effective team performance through meta- analytic approach. After reviewing many laboratory and field studies on the effects of a task, Locke et al found that specific and challenging goals setting contributes better performance [9]. Imbrie et al. [4] operationalized team effectiveness through interdependency, potency, goal setting and learning.

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Wang, J., & Imbrie, P. (2009, June), Assessing Team Effectiveness: Comparing Peer Evaluations To A Team Effectiveness Instrument Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5770