Collaboration rules: A narrative comparison of engineering students and practicing engineers' collaboration experiences and beliefs using structuration theory

Abstract

Background

Collaboration—including coordination, communication, and teamwork—is crucial to engineering practice. However, engineering students are often perceived as lacking key collaboration skills at the time of graduation.

Purpose

We used structuration theory to explore how differences between students and practitioners' collaboration beliefs related to differences between academic and professional collaboration contexts. We sought to demonstrate that the perceived collaboration “skill gap” in engineering students can be explained by differences between academic and professional social systems.

Methods

We conducted interviews with 30 undergraduate engineering students and 28 practicing engineers, and from these interviews produced 98 discrete narratives of participants' collaboration experiences. We thematically analyzed these 98 collaboration narratives to identify student and practitioner collaboration beliefs. We further coded four narratives for organizational enablements and constraints to show how differences in student and practitioner collaboration beliefs related to differences in organizational collaboration “rules.”

Findings

Students described boosting productivity through teamwork and limiting social bonding with teammates. These beliefs represented reasonable approaches to collaboration given observed organizational constraints including short project durations, single-discipline teams, and an inability to choose teammates. Practitioner beliefs about the importance of cross-functional collaboration and building collaborator rapport across projects reflected organizational enablements that facilitated collaborations with these qualities.

Conclusions

Students' beliefs about appropriate academic collaboration practices did not translate to professional contexts. Instructors can prepare students for work by strategically easing collaboration constraints to allow for more diverse collaboration experiences. Work mentors should explain the collaboration expectations of their workplaces to facilitate new hire socialization.