Making Project Groups Work: The Impact of Structuring Group Roles on the Performance and Perception of Information Systems Project Teams

Abstract

While teams in the business environment are highly structured with clearly defined roles, unstructured project teams in the educational environment suffer from communication and coordination problems. We demonstrated the impact of this lack of structure by providing distinct roles and responsibilities for two sections of an Information Systems class while leaving two other sections without imposed structure. The structured teams not only reported a more positive experience with the project, they also scored significantly better. This paper discusses team structure followed by the methodology and results of the study. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings, implications for teaching and further research.