Abstract:

Group culture is a defining element in shaping the culture of any organization. So the culture of student groups is a cornerstone in building the organizational culture of a faculty or university. In technical universities, emphasis is placed on both individual and team work. On the one hand, academics want groups of hardworking, communicative students, able to quickly acquire all the theoretical and practical teachings. On the other hand, employers in the industrial field want engineers who can integrate extremely quickly into any team and get new group performances. But industry managers and university professors should take into account the human side of the engineers they coordinate and professionally train. There are many elements that increase the efficiency of individual work within a group. We just enumerate some of these elements that influence the performance of students, future engineering graduates: their attitudes towards work, their learning style, their personality, and their model of thinking in decision-making, model based on attracting or rejecting risk.

This paper aims to prove that a student group, as well as any team working in the industry, it is good to have individuals with different personalities and thinking patterns in decision-making, in order to increase their learning performance and to improve the results of their practical activities carried out in the team. Of course, as the case study presented in the paper will demonstrate, a team composed of different individuals is more difficult to coordinate than a homogeneous team. But once we have a good degree of cohesion for her members, the results are beyond our expectations.

The case study has involved the students in the terminal year of Economical Engineering in Mechanical Field from “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu. One of the important results was the confirmation that university education has helped to create a positive attitude toward work among students, regardless of whether they belong to the dominant or dominated type of personality. Another important result was that some members of the analyzed student group have remained quite individualistic, even after nearly four academic years, during which teachers formed working teams in many subjects taught. Finally, the paper tries to provide some explanations for these findings.

Keywords:

Group, attitude, culture, dominant, dominated.