STEMskiller: Skill Set Map for Mentors of Early Career Researchers
CAREER MANAGEMENT
Leadership and teamwork
Definition:
While leadership and teamwork skills are often discussed as being essential for effective academic and non-academic careers, very little emphasis is placed on these skills at present in formal STEM training curricula. The resources presented in this section provide mentors with lists of competencies which mentees (and perhaps the mentors themselves) should develop. The highlighted resources might inspire institutions or other organizations to develop similar training interventions.
Useful Leadership and Teamwork resources:
Bowen, W. & Tobin, Eugene M. (2015). Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvd58v75
Chapter summaries are openly available (otherwise JSTOR access required for reading full text or can be ordered via your library’s interlibrary loan staff). Provides a history of higher education in the U.S. context, descriptions of the challenges faced by current higher educational leaders, and cases studies describing the evolution of faculty in governance at several four institutions: a “multi-campus flagship public university,” a liberal arts college, an “elite private research university (with no professional schools),” and “the largest urban university of two- and four-year colleges in the United States.” Helpful for introducing leadership concepts to young faculty members, including broader societal responsibilities such as “the principle that higher education is the pathway to social mobility (p.2).”
McEwan, D., Ruissen, G.R., Eys, Mark A., Zumbo, B.D., Beauchamp, M.R. (2017). The effectiveness of teamwork training on teamwork behaviors and team performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled interventions. PLoS ONE 12(1): e0169604. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604
Provides useful definitions of taskwork (individual skills, competencies) and teamwork, including useful example of the latter (“the seamless communication between a surgeon, nurse, and anaesthesiologist, rather than the technical competencies of these practitioners”) together with evidence-based discussion (following review of 16,849 unique articles) about the questions of who can benefit from teamwork training and what types of training work, concluding that:
When taken together these findings suggest that teamwork training should incorporate experiential activities that provide participants with more active ways of learning and practising teamwork. These may include various workshop-style exercises that involve all team members, such as working through case studies of how teams can improve teamwork, watching and critiquing video vignettes of teams displaying optimal versus suboptimal teamwork, discussing and setting teamwork-related goals and action plans, or other activities that help stimulate critical thinking and active learning of effective teamwork. Teams may also find it useful to conduct simulations of specific team tasks that the group is likely to encounter in-situ, such as aviation teams using an airplane simulator, surgical teams conducting mock-surgeries on medical manikins, military teams practising various field missions, and so on. Teamwork can be also fostered by having team members participate in team reviews/briefings before, during, and/or after the execution of team tasks that occur in-situ. In summary, simply lecturing about the importance of teamwork is not sufficient to create meaningful improvements in teamwork; rather, substantive positive effects can be derived by having team members engage in activities that require them to actively learn about and practise teamwork.
Tags: All IPS; all PSR; all GL; all Comp
Peer Review: None
Table of contents:
3.2. Leadership and teamwork
- 3.2.1. Managing for researchers
3.2.2. Project management
3.2.3. Decision making: crucial factors, processes and approaches
3.2.4. Conflict management
3.2.5. Self-efficiency ("independence") and academic perseverance
3.2.6. Social responsibility/taking on responsibility
3.2.7. Sustainable mobility strategies based on international cooperation
3.2.8. Intercultural collaboration skills: acting successfully in an international academic environment (includes international awareness, international communication)
Author: Stephanie Krueger
Peer Reviewer(s): None
Last Updated: October 28, 2021