Analysing teamwork in higher education: an empirical study on the antecedents and consequences of team cohesiveness

ABSTRACT

One of the most important components of effective teamwork is cohesiveness. However, few empirical studies on the antecedents and consequences of group cohesiveness exist. In response to this gap, the current study draws on the Input-Process-Output model of team effectiveness to investigate the impact of individual and task factors on team cohesiveness, as well as the influence of team cohesiveness on students’ perceived learning, satisfaction with teamwork, and expected quality of the outcome. Based on a survey of 160 undergraduate students who worked in groups, the findings show that individual factors (cooperativeness and collaborative behaviour) have a positive influence on team cohesiveness, while task factors (workload and task complexity) have a negative influence on it. According to the results obtained, the highest effect of cohesiveness is on satisfaction with teamwork. Finally, both perceived learning and expected quality predict satisfaction with teamwork.

KEYWORDS:

• Teamwork
• collaborative behaviour
• workload
• task complexity
• team cohesiveness
• team effectiveness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

José M. Pina http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3422-4542

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Government of Spain under I+D+I project ECO2013-41257-P; the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund under project ‘Generés’ S-09 and pre-doctoral grant BOA 28/08/2014.