Navigating Team Dialogues: How Team Dynamics Affect Convergent and Divergent Design Actions During Concept Generation and Selection

Abstract Communication plays a pivotal role in design teams and can impact team dynamics and design outcomes. Understanding the relationships between design communication and design trajectory can significantly improve our ability to track and optimize design processes. While prior work has investigated design convergence, there is limited work on how team climate and communicative patterns impact the design process. This study investigates the interactions between team climate, communication, and design actions. We estimate team climate as an individual’s perception of their team’s psychological safety, or how comfortable they feel sharing thoughts and ideas freely. Design actions were measured using a behavioral coding schema and audio recordings of design team interactions. In this work, 28 participants and 5 design thinking experts engaging in a design thinking workshop were studied to understand the relationship between design communication, process, and team climate. Contrary to expectations, this mixed-methods study found no significant correlation between perceived psychological safety and design behaviors in engineering design teams, challenging prior research suggesting a positive link. This finding highlights the complexity of team dynamics and underscores the need for further exploration to understand how psychological safety, conversational behaviors, and design actions interact to shape collaborative processes and innovation in design teams.