Exploring Team Social Responsibility in Multidisciplinary Design Teams
- Conference
- Location
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Salt Lake City, Utah
- Publication Date
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June 23, 2018
- Start Date
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June 23, 2018
- End Date
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July 27, 2018
- Conference Session
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Ethical Awareness and Social Responsibility in a Corporate/Team Context
- Tagged Division
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Liberal Education/Engineering & Society
- Page Count
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17
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--30496
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/30496
- Download Count
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462
Paper Authors
Katharine E. Miller Purdue University, West Lafayette
Katharine E. Miller is a second-year doctoral student studying Organizational Communication and Public Relations at Purdue University, with minors in corporate social responsibility and research methods.
Carla B. Zoltowski Purdue University, West Lafayette
Carla B. Zoltowski is an assistant professor of engineering practice in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) Engineering Education, and Director of the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program within the College of Engi
Patrice Marie Buzzanell
University of South Florida
orcid.org/0000-0003-0058-7676
Patrice M. Buzzanell is Distinguished University Professor and immediate past Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida and Endowed Visiting Professor for the School of Media and Design at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Fellow and Past President of the International Communication Association (ICA), she also is a Distinguished Scholar for the National Communication Association (NCA), Past President of the Council of Communication Associations, and Past President and Wise Woman of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender. She has received career achievement awards from ICA, NCA, the Central States Communication Association, and Purdue University where she was a Distinguished University Professor in communication and engineering education (by courtesy) and Endowed Chair and Director of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence. Her primary research areas are organizational communication, career, work-life, resilience, feminist/gender, and design. Her grants have focused on ethics, institutional transformation, and diversity-equity-inclusion-belongingness in the professional formation of engineers.
David Torres Purdue University, West Lafayette
David is a fourth year doctoral candidate in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University pursuing a PhD in Organizational Communication with a minor in data analysis and research methodology. His research interests reside at the intersection of organizational communication, identity, design, and organizational ethics.
Danielle Corple Purdue University
Danielle Corple is a Ph.D. student in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. She studies organizational communication as well as qualitative and computational research methods. Her specific research interests are gender, organizing, and ethics in online and offline contexts.
Megan Kenny Feister California State University, Channel Islands
Megan Kenny Feister is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Communication at California State University Channel Islands. She previously held a postdoctoral research position working on her grant funded research in Engineering Projects in Community Service at Purdue University. She is a recipient of the Purdue Research Foundation dissertation grant and co-wrote a National Science Foundation grant for her dissertation and postdoctoral work in Organizational Communication at Purdue. Her primary research interests include collaboration and innovation; negotiations of expertise in team-based organizational work; team processes and decision-making; ethical reasoning, constitution, and processes; engineering design; technology and its impacts on organizational and personal life; network analysis; as well as organizational identity, identification, and culture.
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) provides organizations with ways of contributing to social well-being over and above profit maximization and legal obligations by considering wider stakeholders’ influences and interests. Similarly, we contend that teams within organizational contexts also have responsibilities and multilevel impacts to consider. This paper introduces our notion of team social responsibility (TSR) to enable us to examine how members perceive and enact their accountability to both internal and external stakeholders affected by their work. We focus on engineering design teams embedded within a service-learning program at a large, Midwestern university to explicate how TSR contributes to theory and practice in engineering education, particularly in preparing students for their professional endeavors beyond the classroom. Findings suggest tensions in student perceptions of self-vs-team responsibility, particularly in attributions of responsibilities or obligations to their project partners, to their team members through team dynamics and individual roles, and to multiple stakeholders. This study is unique in its goal of expanding work on social responsibility and moral decision-making, specifically in terms of engineering pedagogy.
Miller, K. E., & Zoltowski, C. B., & Buzzanell, P. M., & Torres, D., & Corple, D., & Kenny Feister, M. (2018, June), Exploring Team Social Responsibility in Multidisciplinary Design Teams Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30496
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