Effects of team-skills guidance on accounting students with lone wolf tendencies

ABSTRACT

We investigate whether short-term in-class team-skills guidance impacts the perceptions of accounting students with lone wolf tendencies on team work, and peer evaluation systems adopted in team work. We find that students with greater lone wolf tendencies see fewer benefits from engaging in team work and are also less comfortable with peer evaluation systems. In terms of team-skills guidance, we find that students who are exposed to this are more aware of shortcomings in their teams and are more concerned about there being collusion in peer evaluation ratings. In terms of interaction effects, we find that the team-skills guidance explored in our study results in students with greater lone wolf tendencies perceiving one positive benefit from engaging in team work: they find working on the project to be easier than students not exposed to this team-skills guidance. Students with greater lone wolf tendencies who undergo team-skills guidance are also more concerned that friendship and popularity may distort the reliability of peer evaluation. Among students with lesser lone wolf tendencies, we find that team-skills guidance results in the perception of fewer benefits from engaging in team work on a number of dimensions when compared to students not exposed to team-skills guidance.

KEYWORDS:

• Team work
• team-skills guidance
• lone wolves
• peer evaluations

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Chong Eng Heng for assisting with the recruitment of study participants. We thank anonymous reviewers and conference participants at the 2014 American Accounting Association Annual Meeting for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Apostolou, Dorminey, Hassell, and Watson (2013); Apostolou, Hassell, Rebele, and Watson (2010), and Watson, Apostolou, Hassell, and Webber (2007) for a review of the accounting education literature including cooperative/ team-based learning.

2 All participants in our study are instructed by the same course instructor.

3 As lone wolves are naturally averse to team work, our design incorporates two short duration in-class team-skills guidance sessions as opposed to one extended session which may have had the effect of alienating the lone wolves in the class and leaving them in a state of limbo without providing any closure on the matter.

4 The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business

5 Prior research suggests that social loafing/free-riding increases as team size increases (Albanese & Van Fleet, 1985). Although the team size for the current project involved either 5 or 6 members, the instructor for the course designed the task demands for the project such that it requires the contribution of 5 or 6 members to ensure the success of the project, thereby minimizing any social loafing tendencies. A team with a lesser number of students would have found it very challenging to accomplish the given task requirements within the stipulated time frame.

6 Neither of the researchers was the course instructor, and the researchers were not involved in the design of the project and the peer evaluation system used. As this was the student participants’ first semester of study in the university, we were not able to capture their GPA scores. There was only one international student among the participants and the results are unchanged with the omission of this participant.

7 As it was the first year of study, students were randomly assigned by the administrative system to the classes under the same instructor. We randomly assigned two of these groups to team skills training and two to the control condition. Hence, both team and condition assignments were random. As the purpose of the team project was to enable teams to independently research and analyze the issues, the instructor did not provide explicit guidance to any of the teams. In instances where students needed clarification relating to certain project requirements, the instructor shared his response with all students. Hence, no team was privy to additional information that would enable it to perform better on the team project in either the team-skills guidance classes or the control classes.

8 We re-ran the analysis by using a different categorization of the lone wolf tendency. Specifically, we split the sample into 3 groups and compared the two extreme groups of individuals with lone wolf tendencies (31 individuals with lesser lone wolf tendencies and 33 with greater lone wolf tendencies). The results are directionally consistent with what we observe with our full sample.

9 To enable the instructor to facilitate the discussion, we provided the instructor with some guidance on the characteristics of successful teams (e.g. clear sense of direction and vision; priorities and deadlines clearly set; team work divided fairly between members; a spirit of give-and-take; active listening; being responsive to others’ ideas etc.), some potential problems and possible ways of resolving these problems (e.g. problem of free riders, minimize problem by clarifying and specifying, up front, role expectations and deliverables from each member and rotating roles such as leader/recorder/devil’s advocate/encourager at each meeting; problem of dominant team member to be resolved by rotating roles; problem of team conflicts to be resolved by discussing problems in a friendly way to arrive at a win-win solution, putting self in other’s shoes to see what it’s like from their point of view, etc.).

10 Some characteristics of successful teams as identified by students include: clear communication, active discussion and contribution from members.

11 Some potential problems identified by students in Week 1 include: team members lacking in ideas (with the proposed solutions of brainstorming and doing more research before discussions), team members facing difficulty in arranging common meeting times due to varying class schedules (with the proposed solutions of identifying a common time slot each week and fixing this up-front as project discussion time), and free riding (resolved by setting expectations up front).

12 The researchers were informed by the instructor that no student in either the experimental or the control group expressed any concerns about the different duration of classes in these weeks.

13 The results are based on the responses of 96 participants.

14 The average rating is 7.47 which is significantly above the mid-point of 6 (p = 0.000), suggesting greater than moderate contribution from other team members.

15 When we analyze the 2-way interaction between team-skills guidance and lone wolf tendencies at each level of lone wolf tendency, we find that among students with greater and lesser lone wolf tendencies, there is no significant effect of team-skills guidance on their perceptions (p = 0.121 and 0.104, respectively).

Additional information

Funding

Jean Lin Seow gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 [grant number C206-SMU-004].