Abstract:

Over the last three decades, globalization processes have modified the demand for new professional competencies. Engineers are now required to invest in those new competencies to be competitive in the labor market. Among the competencies required team-work is one of the most demanded, probably because engineers don´t have many opportunities to strengthen this competence during their stay in the University.

This paper presents the results of the training with a simulator (Leadership and team simulation: Everest) to strengthen team-work competence for engineers. The simulator has been designed by Harvard Business Publishing with the objective to help participants to lead effective teams. During the experience a team of five people (with five different roles) has to go to the Everest making decisions together and solving problems when they have different information and opposite interest.

The utilization of the simulator took place during the development of a workshop taught in the Leadership and Technology Center in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The workshop has a length of eight hours since, when the game finishes (90 minutes’ duration), students reflect on how to improve team-work based on simulator results.

At the end the simulator measures the performance of each team member and of the whole team. The tool has been used during two years with 25 teams (250 participants) in engineering school (professors, students and administrative staff). Data have been analyzed with a configurational comparative method, a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), to analyze which patterns or combinations of conditions may explain high team performance. The FsQCA approach is gaining relevance in studies within the education science.

The outcome is team performance and the conditions analyzed are team effectiveness, psychological safety (trust), cognitive conflict, affective conflict, leader effectiveness, leader directive on process, leader directive on content and fair process.

It is interesting to highlight that results show that leader effectiveness and fair process are needed to achieve team success. Also that team success is determined by the combination of several conditions and which ones are needed to obtain better results.

Keywords:

Simulation training, Leadership, Teamwork, Engineering, Fuzzy analysis.