Abstract:

Teamwork has become an indispensable competence to be developed in almost every company and organisation. Therefore, it is already a key component of the learning processes in the university studies. In this paper we examine heterogeneity in motivations and attitudes towards teamwork between students from different academic degrees. Previous studies have documented that students with economic background behave more consistently with the standard economic model based on selfish preferences, compared to students from other disciplines. We focus our attention on first-year university students because our interest is to evaluate whether teamwork differences between academic profiles are the result of different motivations and personal traits of students before entering university or, by contrast, teamwork is a competence which is differently developed within each university degree. As methodology, we conduct laboratory experiments and assess multiple behavioral measures directly related to the individual ability to work in teams. The total sample is formed by 186 students from five academic profiles offered at the University of Jaén (Spain): Sciences, Business Administration, Law, Humanities and Engineering. In order to obtain representative data, we use a quota sampling method. This method ensures that sample represents certain characteristics of the population, in our case, academic profile according to available official data (academic year 2015/16). The sample size is determined using a simple random sampling, commonly used when the population size is large enough and quota sampling is applied.

We incentivized decision-making and obtain economic and psychological indicators typically used by researchers to classify individuals according to their attitude towards cooperation and competition in teamwork. In particular, we use three economic frameworks:
i) a public goods game for cooperative preferences,
ii) a Tullock contest game for competitive preferences, and
iii) an incentive-scheme choice task for competition incentives. Among psychological frameworks, we select two:
i) the decomposed game technique for social preferences according to a value orientation circle, and
ii) a cultural values 24-item questionnaire for horizontal and vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism.

The data are analysed at two levels. We first run an exploratory analysis to classify students according to their preferences and personality traits (in general and by academic profiles). Second, we study the possible interactions between pairs of categorical variables by using the Chi-square tests for independence. The main important findings are between students from business and the rest of academic profiles. Our analysis reveals that academic profile relates significantly to cultural values (vertical individualism, p=0.0009, and vertical collectivism, p=0.0389) and to self-selection of competitive incentive scheme (p=0.0389). In line with previous literature, our findings show that business students are more likely to accept inequalities within a collective (collectivism) or between autonomous individuals (individualism). However, non-business students tend to emphasis on equality in both dimensions. Lastly, we obtain a stronger preference of non-business students for non-competitive incentive systems compared to business students.

Keywords:

Teamwork competence, preferences, personality traits, experiment.