Mastering team crises: a play-oriented approach to foster resilience capabilities in student teams

ABSTRACT

Students are often confronted with challenging situations when working together in teams. To successfully overcome such situations, remain productive, and achieve their study goal, students need to develop resilience capabilities. However, until now, there has been only scant research on resilience in student teams and opportunities for its development. This study aims to explore how LEGO^® Serious Play^® (LSP) as a play-oriented training approach can help to develop resilience capabilities in student teams. We used a qualitative research approach and formed three groups of student teams that had to work on the same case study, but, in advance, each received a different type of LSP training. For data collection, we video recorded the case study work of all student teams. The qualitative content analysis of the extensive video material shows that training focused on team building and resilience achieves the best results with regard to group dynamics and resilience behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• LEGO^® Serious Play^®
• resilience capabilities
• student resilience
• teamwork

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Additionally, we used questionnaires to collect information about the students’ individual resilience as well as their social and team-related skills in order to demonstrate comparability between the groups.