Abstract:

With recent globalization in business field, it is increasingly important for teams consisting of multinational, multidisciplinary and multicultural members to be capable of handling problems flexibly and properly. Supposing that faced to unexpected problems or changes in the process of teamwork, the subsequent results deeply depend on prompt decision making and close collaboration between team members. It can also be said that teamwork has a crucial role in the current world of VUCA (vitality, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), which reflect an increasingly unstable and rapidly changing business world. As for the team to make considerable achievements under unexpected situations, it is necessary to understand the characters and interpersonal orientation of the team members.

This paper introduces the influence of 4 types of individual ability (team-oriented, backup, monitoring and leadership) on teamwork through pre and post improvisational education method, the OMG (Oh My God experience). It was set in the PBL (Project-Based Learning), a short span project as a higher education which is aimed to acquire skills to design and create solution in teams consisted of multinational students. The OMG requires flexible decision making and close collaboration within a team to achieve unexpected missions. Therefore, we hypothesized that a team could reach to a higher level when the members put priority on team goals over individuals and strengthen their team-orientation in such situation. Original survey was conducted to 36 participants from 4 countries, Japan, Portugal, Spain and Thailand.

The result showed the number of participants who considered team-oriented ability as important increased 17 % whereas leadership ability decreased 11 %. Though leadership is a key for successful teamwork, the result indicated that a team could recognize and foster team-oriented ability through OMG. Moreover, the top three teams who received a high evaluation in the OMG mission put emphasis on team-oriented ability. On the other hand, the lower three teams didn’t put much value on team-oriented ability. From these results, we believe that a team could strengthen team-oriented ability through unexpected situation and furthermore, to survive the VUCA world.

Keywords:

Project-Based Learning, Higher education, Improvisation, Teamwork competency, Multinational team.