WIP: Predicting Psychological Safety by Individual and Team-Level Factors across Engineering Project Life Span Using Multilevel Models of Change

Monitoring perceived psychological safety in engineering project teams helps instructors better manage student teams to lead to students’ positive learning experiences and outcomes, especially for teams with minoritized and culturally diverse students. Teams with diverse backgrounds are found to experience reduced cohesiveness and more interpersonal and task conflict as people are less likely to work well with self-identified out-group members. Meanwhile, teams with diversified members have the potential to benefit from a richer pool of resources and experiences to produce more creative and higher-quality outcomes. Thus, diverse team composition could carry both positive and negative influences towards student perceived psychological safety across the team life span. Using multilevel models of change, we investigate how the diversity at individual and team levels influences psychological safety across time for 1463 first-year engineering students in 390 teams conducting team projects. Future work will explore how students’ demographic and academic ability and the team composition affect perceived psychological safety to better inform engineering student team management for the instructors.