Abstract:

Soft skills are very important in nowadays environment as they improve an individual's interactions, job performance, and career prospects. To meet the needs of new possibilities and challenges, entrepreneurs must constantly improve their business skills, industry-specific technological skills, soft skills and must also be able to develop a self-awareness of their passions so as to build a team that complements their needs. Creating a positive synergy gives team members the opportunity to contribute with their own experiences, passions, values, talents, communication styles to the team performance.

The goal of the present article is to assess the impact that a teamwork game, designed for entrepreneurial education has on different groups. The method is based on a game and consists in offering a team a lot of mixed information (relevant and irrelevant) expecting them to work together and achieve a goal by making use of their abilities of critical thinking, time management, task organization, and distribution, communication and leadership skills.

The method was used in five different contexts and applied to five different teams, namely two groups of employees and three groups of engineering students from different specializations, were tested.

The hypothesis related to a positive correlation between best group performances and teamwork experience was not validated in all working groups. Factors that most influenced the results were power distance, background, and curricula, but values and motivation in each group had also an impact on the results and group efficiency. Onsite and online interaction did not impact the group performance.

Keywords:

Soft skills, entrepreneurial education, learning tools, universities.