Effects of team-skills guidance on accounting students with lone wolf tendencies

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe investigate whether short-term in-class team-skills guidance impacts the perceptions of accounting students with lone wolf tendencies on team work, and peer evaluation systems adopted in team work. We find that students with greater lone wolf tendencies see fewer benefits from engaging in team work and are also less comfortable with peer evaluation systems. In terms of team-skills guidance, we find that students who are exposed to this are more aware of shortcomings in their teams and are more concerned about there being collusion in peer evaluation ratings. In terms of interaction effects, we find that the team-skills guidance explored in our study results in students with greater lone wolf tendencies perceiving one positive benefit from engaging in team work: they find working on the project to be easier than students not exposed to this team-skills guidance. Students with greater lone wolf tendencies who undergo team-skills guidance are also more concerned that friendship and popularity may distort the reliability of peer evaluation. Among students with lesser lone wolf tendencies, we find that team-skills guidance results in the perception of fewer benefits from engaging in team work on a number of dimensions when compared to students not exposed to team-skills guidance.