Abstract:

Introduction:
Teamwork effectiveness in engineering teams has been a trending topic since the beginning of the last century, that it is why high education accreditation in engineering considers teamwork competencies as one of the most important competencies to add in the study plans. To enhance teamwork effectiveness and therefore teamwork competencies, many studies have focused on the incorporation of team coaching in the classroom. Many types of coaching have been proved such as peer-coaching, leader as a coach or agile coaching, however, there is not any study about how non-directive coaching (external coaching with all the team at the same time and without any knowledge transfer between the coach and the team) impacts on the team effectiveness.
The objective of this study is to compare the effectiveness of the team when it participates in a non-directive team coaching process and when it does not participate.

Methods:
The study has been carried out with teams of students in an annual subject in first year of the master’s in industrial engineering in ETSII- UPM. This subject has different projects and all of them are based in CDIO framework. This study measured teams involved in the development of 8 different projects, with 27 Teams participating. An experimental group of 2 Teams was selected to take part in the non-directive coaching process. It has consisted of a total of 7 sessions: First session with the teachers responsible for the project to define the objective to be reached by the teams; one session with the team to align the objective with the teachers; four follow-up sessions with the team and one closing session. No tools or feedback have been transferred between the external coach and the teams.
The effectiveness has been measured with a validated test called Team Diagnostic Survey (Wageman et al., 2005), a Likert test where the fundamental elements of team composition, teamwork process and team effectiveness are measured. This test has been used at the end of the course, after the teams have been working for the entire course.
To analyse the statistical results, RStudio 4.2.0 software has been used. A descriptive analysis and ANOVA have been applied to study if the differences between control group and experimental group are significant and therefore team coaching influences the effectiveness of teams.

Results:
Results show that there is not significant influence in the experimental group in the effectiveness of teams, however, factors as clarity of the objective and the strategic to reach the objective have significant influence. Despite the influence of the coaching, the experimental group is the project with the higher value in General Satisfaction, Satisfaction Growth opportunities and satisfaction team relationship, that there are 3 out of 5 variables to measure team effectiveness.

Discussion:
More data in the experimental group should be collected to give more basis to the statistical data, since there is a discordance between the statistical data and the results obtained in the descriptive analysis.

Keywords:

Teamwork, assessment competencies, higher education.