Product design team interactions and peer feedback as indicators of team success

Abstract

Teams have become ubiquitous. They are used at all levels of academia, government, and industry, and their use spans all sectors and fields. Much work has been done on the factors that affect a team's performance and how and what type of interventions may be useful in improving a team's performance. One such type of intervention is peer review and feedback. In this study, team peer reviews completed during a semester-long product design project at MIT are coded into the categories of skills, effort, and performance strategies, and within those categories, whether comments are positive or negative, to attempt to determine a correlation between the way team members try to shape each other's behaviors and the eventual performance of the team. Results, although inconclusive, provide insights into potential directions of future research in this area.