Despite increasing interest in transdisciplinary engineering (TE), how to evaluate transdisciplinary (TD) working remains unclear. Moreover, the “right” balance of competencies of researchers, teams, and collaborators (including academic and societal actors) who form the TD team remains broad. This paper aims to enhance clarity by presenting a model that differentiates the individual and team-level competencies required to work in a multidisciplinary (MD), interdisciplinary (ID) and TD way. To construct the model, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) which identified key competencies required to engage in TD research. The competencies were qualitatively extracted, inductively analysed and thematically grouped to describe skills attributes and development in the progression towards TD work. The model illustrates that MD competencies focus on goal achievement (which in themselves may be discipline-targeted or distributed), ID competencies focus on integrating ideas from different disciplines, with an explicit appreciation of non-disciplinary and non-academic perspectives on technical advancement, and TD competencies focus on the synthesis of new ideas, solutions or approaches through collaborative skills and common high-level motivational drivers. We characterise the progression of such cross-disciplinary working as emergent, emphasising that a combination of individually held, and team-held competencies in addition to a researcher’s disciplinary background, influence TD work effectiveness. When working in a TD way, the individuals involved in the research do not need to be knowledgeable in all the disciplinary knowledge held by all group members. Instead, individuals within the TD team provide insights into how their discipline sees or understands a particular problem.