Only as Strong as the Strongest Link: The Relative Contribution of Individual Team Member Proficiency in Configuration Design

Prior research has demonstrated how the average characteristics of a team impact team performance. The relative contribution of team members has been largely ignored, especially in the context of engineering design. In this work, a behavioral study was conducted with 78 participants to uncover whether the most or least proficient member of a configuration design team had a larger impact on overall performance. Proficiency is an individual's ability to deal with a specific range of problem. It was found that a configuration design team is most dependent on the proficiency of its most proficient member. The most proficient member had a significant positive effect on how quickly the team reached performance thresholds and the other members of the team were not found to have the same positive impact throughout the design study. Behavioral heuristics were found using hidden Markov modeling to capture the differences in behavior and design strategy between different proficiency members. Results show that high proficiency and low proficiency team members exhibit different behavior, with the most proficient member's behavior leading to topologically simpler designs and other members adopting their designs, leading to the most proficient member driving the team design and thus the team performance. These results underscore the value of the relative contribution model in constructing engineering teams by demonstrating that different team members had unequal effects on team performance. It is shown that enhancing the most proficient member of a team is more likely to contribute to increased team performance than enhancing the least proficient member.