Abstract:

The paper presents a case study of a team-based learning project in a strategic management course conducted among international management students in a Turkish university. The students' learning reflection, course materials, and communication were used to access the learning, team development, and leadership process. Besides, the written strategic audits (team projects) and individual midterm and final exams were used to evaluate the class performance, which was compared with the results of another course section, conducted in a traditional, lecture-based and group project, style. Also, team leaders were interviewed after the completion of the course. The presented case study course had better student performance and satisfaction. In this paper, the concepts from the domain of team learning, leadership theory, social cognitive theory, and cross-cultural management are used to identify factors influencing team development and learning in higher education. In contrast to the majority of learning projects in international business education, the teams were not assigned by the instructor, and neither the students were allowed to form their teams. Following the prevailing business practice, the team leaders were hired/assigned by the instructor and they formed their teams, selecting members from the class in competition with each other. Throughout the semester, the teams participated in a strategic audit of a company in competition with the other teams. The leaders were responsible for task assignments, team communication and collaboration, quality control and compiling learning reflections of team members and submitting them with a weekly installment of the draft audit to the Turnitin software. The course followed a flipped classroom learning model, where the readings and research were assigned weekly as home assignments, and the weekly class meeting started with a short introduction and Q&A lecture, followed by in team work on combining their research and evaluating the selected companies. The feedback on the draft installments was provided to each team leader weekly and was discussed in teams during the class meetings. The midterm and the final exams were designed in teams as well, with each team providing several relevant short answer questions, which then were shared with the other teams and the instructor selecting one question per team for the class midterm and final exam (5 questions total). While the students came from different cultural backgrounds, they all come from cultures that have high power distance, high collectivism and medium to high uncertainty avoidance indexes (Hofstede, 1980[1]). It can be argued that an assigned authority role and responsibilities could promote better team development and leadership skill in such cultures than more commonly used in business education groups projects, which are recognized to be crippled by free-riding behavior, a lack of responsibility for the academic integrity and uneven contributions by group members to a project and thus uneven learning. The case provides some suggestions on the organization of leader-led team-based learning in international management education and presents possible topics for future research.

Keywords:

Team-based learning, cooperative learning, leadership theory, team leadership, international business education.