The article deals with the problem of the distribution of roles in a team at work. The efficiency of the distribution of roles in the team ensures the efficiency of activities, reduces the conflict ...of interaction and increases the level of adaptability of the team to changes in the external environment. The main attention is paid to the team role of a leader, which determines the organization and peculiarities of the team. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to determine the problems of the distribution of team roles and the peculiarities of the leader’s role behaviour. The theories of the distribution of team roles proposed by such authors as R.M. Belbin, R. Schindler, and T. Bazarov were analyzed. Each of the theories was analyzed and their features, possibilities of use for the study of the leader’s roles and problems of application in practice were determined. The main problem is the difficulty with the distribution of team roles in functional divisions (mainly the same types of functions are performed) compared to project teams. By modeling the leader’s behaviour, the influence of his team role on the functioning of the division and the distribution of roles in it was determined. As a result, it was identified that the main problem of determining the distribution of roles in a functional division is a significant shift in the result towards the main type of its activity, which requires clarification or adaptation of the diagnostic apparatus. It is proposed to distinguish a social and labour role that combines functional (labour) and team (social), focusing only on the type of activity. The following types of social and labour roles are distinguished: executive, adaptive and creative. It is proposed to apply the same classification to the leader, which will allow his role to be considered inseparable from the roles of employees, which is especially important for functional divisions. This classification makes it possible to facilitate the process of diagnosing the predominant roles and determine the features of the basic functions of the division and the problems of the team’s activity.
Employing an agile development methodology, particularly Scrum, in a distributed student project setting is challenging for both teachers and involved students. Allowing distributed student teams to ...self-organize and assign key Scrum roles using various strategies, specifically regarding the locations of students taking on key roles, increases the complexity of such projects. In addition, the interaction of the Project Owner role with the project customer, which occurs outside the distributed student team, adds a new dimension to this problem. This paper investigates the impact of various key role assignment strategies, and their interactions, on the performance of distributed student projects. Furthermore, we investigate the intensity of collaboration within the distributed team and between key project roles, as well as their impact on project performance. We analyzed data collected on 37 distributed student projects conducted over the course of eight academic years. The results reveal that letting students assign key project roles regardless of their location in the distributed team has no significant impact on the quality of project outcomes. However, a deeper analysis uncovers that more educationally desirable assignments of those roles exist; favoring increased collaboration intensity within distributed student teams.
Team communication plays a vital role in engineering management, however, there is a paucity of work that examines how team roles emerge as a response to the communicative processes between ...participants. This research explored role adoption using qualitative methods comprising observations, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Five student teams doing final year projects at a university in New Zealand were observed during the academic year and then interviewed at the final stage of project completion. A number of team roles in the engineering context were identified for students and their supervisors: Explorer; Initiator; Facilitator; Active and Passive Information Provider; Outsider; Active and Passive Connector; Passive Collector; Arbitrator; Gatekeeper and Representative. Personal factors, such as social sensitivity, were correlated with the choice of team behaviour pattern. In addition, the team roles could be arranged in circular order to create a circumplex, the two axes of which were identified as Personal Agency/Communion and Social engagement/Social disengagement.
Marketing programs rely heavily on team projects to foster team performance, however hiring managers continue to note deficiencies in marketing graduates. At the same time, global health concerns ...accelerate the transition to remote work settings. This exploratory study contributes to the team roles literature using a novel psychometric assessment of discrete role types. Results suggest unique performance effects associated with certain roles and role combinations that vary F2F and online. Namely, sharing primary role information and dispersing action-oriented students among online groups can optimize team performance. In contrast, F2F teams benefit from both action orientation and role dominance.
Background: communication is important for project teams. There is a need to better understand how members respond to communication at project meetings, and how this affects the team roles the ...participants adopt. Methods: observational data were collected from (a) two engineering organisations and (b) five university engineering student teams. A mixed methods approach was used, comprising observations (recorded with the interaction diagram method), questionnaires and interviews. Results: participants adjusted their communication style to the behaviour of other people and to different communication settings. This happened with three different dynamics: micro-level (grounding processes in conversation), mezzo-level (emotional and rational regulation) and macro-level (over a period of time). Originality: a new theory was presented for the process of team behaviour during project meetings; specifically, role adoption and communication behavioural changes. Participants change their team roles within three different dynamics: at the macro-, mezzo- and micro-levels, corresponding to the organisation, project and meeting, respectively. The changing of team roles in project meetings arises from rational and emotional regulation. The findings have the potential to assist managers and supervisors to better understand and manage the team dynamics on their projects.
Psychometrics measures mental traits, abilities, and processes. This article presents popular industry approaches to psychometric testing and how to apply them to the role of the software architect.
Managers often deal with uncertainty of a different nature in their decision processes. The objective of the contribution is to confirm or refute the facts published in professional literature ...including the opinions resulting from the erudition of the author of the paper claiming that human factor errors and identifying causes of successful / unsuccessful completion of business projects is a significant explicit factor. With regard to this finding, the paper will deal with the quintessence of the human factor positive/negative impact on the business projects success, as well as recognizing and prevention of negative impacts on the implementation of success/failure a business project. The theoretical part defines the influence of the human factor and correlation of a business project success/failure with the SMART method. The analytical part of the paper interprets the theoretical findings into practical models of project teams by means of comparison and erudition of the author of the paper. The final part proposes measures, suggestions and recommendations concerning the optimal setting of the human factor key values so that the personality positive/negative impact on the business project success is evaluated and from the socio-economic perspective in terms of invested financial resources and the return of investment, from a substantive and time point of view. For the purposes of the contribution, the term “influence“ can be divided into exogenous and endogenous, while “success“ can be defined as a determinant of positive/negative fulfilment of expected vision and business strategy entities. In terms of project management, “project” is a set of individual and unique activities to implement a planned change or innovation in a given period of time using specific sources.
The problem of assigning students to teams can be described as maximising their profiles diversity within teams while minimising the differences among teams. This problem is commonly known as the ...maximally diverse grouping problem and it is usually formulated as maximising the sum of the pairwise distances among students within teams. We propose an alternative algorithm in which the within group heterogeneity is measured by the attributes' variance instead of by the sum of distances between group members. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by means of two real data sets and the results suggest that it induces better solutions according to two independent evaluation criteria, the Davies-Bouldin index and the number of dominated teams. In conclusion, the results show that it is more adequate to use the attributes' variance to measure the heterogeneity of profiles within the teams and the homogeneity among teams.
The digital revolution has moved translation from the world of paper documents to the land of software, websites, multimedia and databases, giving rise to the concept of localization. The purpose of ...localization is a specific product that will look as if it was intended for a given target market, regardless of language, culture or country. The aim of the paper is to acquire an automated technological line for the cutting of large-area materials, especially chipboard and joints. The methods used were Stakeholder Analysis represented by a matrix structure in tabular form with a point scale ranging from 1 to 10. In order to implement project feedback and subsequent controlling, another method was used, namely the Traffic Light Method. Through the acquired knowledge and finding out the influence of the human factor on the success of the project, it was proved that the success of completing a local project depends mainly on the role and competencies of the project manager in cooperation with the powers of individual members of the project team. One of the main causes of project failure is inappropriate project management methods used, but also failure of human capital.
Project management education is currently facing several challenges to help people deal more effectively with the complexities of their future work. Students' exposure to ‘real’ project situations in ...which they can use, develop, and reflect on their skills as well as learn from each other has become essential and in need of further improvements. This paper presents a group-based approach to project management education which uses the notion of a ‘group’ as a system in order to develop students' individual awareness of and abilities to deal with both expected and unexpected project situations. The approach aims at nurturing and fostering students' involvement in project situations whilst challenging them to go beyond their own learning comfort zones. Reflections from our experience of using this approach in several courses in UK higher education institutions lead us to identify its benefits, different strategies that students use to respond to challenges, and new possibilities to continue improving project management education.
► Review of key challenges in project management education. ► An educational approach that conceives of student groups as systems. ► Presents and articulates key educational interactions, challenges and responses. ► Proposes a typology of learning strategies used by student groups in project tasks. ► Provides insights to enhance project management education.
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