Masters Theses

Suved Rai

Abstract

"Social dynamics, network structures, teamwork, team training, and leadership. These are a few of factors considered highly important in industries around us. Research in these areas has been conducted to find solutions to improve team performance, understand the dynamics of individuals, and to have better leaders amongst us. The intent of this paper was to conduct similar research in an educational environment. Data were collected from freshmen engineering students at the University of Missouri-Rolla. The students were enrolled in four sections of a freshman design project course. The students were given social network surveys and some of them were also subjected to different team trainings as well as facilitation. The first paper studies the social dynamics of the students. That is, it looks at the size of a freshman engineering student's social network, and also how it changes over a semester. Through this study it was seen that the freshman students significantly increased their social network structure over a period of a semester. The second paper studies the effects of interventions in student teams. Two types of team training and facilitation were provided to certain teams to study the effects of the interventions on team performances. Results of this study indicated that certain types of interventions significantly enhanced the performances of teams. The third paper tests the effects of a team's social dynamics on performance, as well as the effect of team leaders on the teams' performances. Here it was seen that the presence of well-connected leaders significantly enhanced team performance. It was also seen that teams with team members who know each other and consider each other as a friend perform significantly better than teams with members who are less closely connected"-- Abstract p. iv

Advisor(s)

Luechtefeld, Ray

Committee Member(s)

Spurlock, David
Nystrom, Halvard E.

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Engineering Management

Publisher

University of Missouri--Rolla

Publication Date

Fall 2006

Journal article titles appearing in thesis/dissertation

  • Social networks - changes over time
  • Facilitation and team performance in engineering student teams
  • Effects of the social networks of leaders on team performance

Pagination

ix, 59 pages

Rights

© 2006 Suved Rai, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

Leadership
Performance
Social networks
Teams in the workplace -- Evaluation

Thesis Number

T 9082

Print OCLC #

123895919

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