Rivals When We Work Together: Team Rivalry Effects on Performance in Collaborative Learning Groups

Oțoiu Oțoiu,Rațiu Rațiu,Rus Rus

doi:10.3390/admsci9030061

Abstract

Team rivalry has been mostly studied in competition settings, between competing individuals or teams, and has been linked to positive performance outcomes due to its impact on increasing motivation. However, rivalry is not limited to such contexts, it can also occur in collaborative settings, among team members working on a collaborative task. We argue that in such settings rivalry in teams has a negative impact on team performance, due to its negative impact on team learning behaviors. We employed a time-lagged, survey-based design with a sample of 176 students (55 teams) to investigate the relationship between rivalry and team performance through team learning behaviors. Our results based on simple mediation analyses show that, for our sample, rivalry in teams was not in fact negatively correlated to learning behaviors. Furthermore, we did not find support for the hypothesized positive relationship between learning behaviors and team performance, nor for the partial mediation model we proposed. We show how a series of team and task characteristics could explain our results and discuss potential future directions in the study of rivalry in collaborative settings.

Highlights

IntroductionRivalry has received a significant amount of attention in the literature, due to its pairing with competition and its pervasive nature across domains and fields of research and practice
Does rivalry foster collaborative dynamic capabilities and performance within a team? Rivalry has received a significant amount of attention in the literature, due to its pairing with competition and its pervasive nature across domains and fields of research and practice
We introduce the concepts of collaborative learning and team learning behaviors and their role in obtaining team performance

Summary

Introduction

Rivalry has received a significant amount of attention in the literature, due to its pairing with competition and its pervasive nature across domains and fields of research and practice. Building upon the literature on team relational losses, we argue that rivalry acts as a proxy to negative relations in teams and has a similar negative effect on team performance through a series of mediating mechanisms. Researching rivalry in this setting could shed light on the relational dynamics between team members and the potential negative effect of rivalry on individual and team performance. Results could yield significant implications for team dynamics and optimizing collaborative learning by overcoming detrimental rivalries

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion