Processes and outcomes in student teamwork. An empirical study in a marketing subject

Abstract

The presence of student teamwork is increasing in most university degrees. However, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the connection between teamwork processes and their outcomes. In this paper, the authors analyze these processes and how they relate to teamwork outcomes from the students’ perspective. Data was gathered from 129 undergraduates in the first year of an economics degree and analyzed by means of structural equations modeling. The main results show that transitional processes are especially important for explaining students’ perceptions of goal attainment, whereas interpersonal processes are key to explaining perceptions of improvement in skills and overall attitude towards the team. Furthermore, this work shows that students’ perception of goal attainment also exerts an influence on improvement in skills and on overall attitude towards the team. The relations found in this work may help instructors to develop effective teamwork activities and to monitor their results.

Keywords:

• teamwork
• students
• processes
• overall outcomes
• goals attainment

Notes

1. Once the latent variable scores are obtained, PLS runs the model following an OLS estimation. In order to obtain more goodness-of-fit indexes, each regression has been run using the statistical program STATA 12.0 and a SUR model has been tested to see whether all the regressions are correlated or independent. This allows us to obtain the F-test and AIC values of each regression and the Chi². The coefficients and t-statistics of path coefficients are similar to those obtained using SmartPLS2.0, which confirms the robustness of our results.