Breaking persistent working group partnerships: a social experiment

Abstract

Facing multidisciplinary projects is becoming quite common in companies worldwide, meaning that experts from a specific area must team up with experts from other areas in a dynamic, ad hoc manner. For a professional to meet such requirements successfully, it is important that teamwork skills are developed during college. However, such issue is usually not addressed thoroughly, and most students end up teaming with the same partners over and over again, thereby failing to achieve the critical adaptability skills expected from them. To address this drawback, in this paper we present the results of a study where students were forced to team up with other partners based on the results of a computer networking skills-ranking exam. Experimental results confirm the repeating pattern in terms of past partnerships, and student resistance to partner changes. On the positive side, results show that having new partners indeed help at achieving a more even task distribution, and that students are moderately aware of the upcoming challenges in their future professional activity, recognizing the benefits of teaming up with new people.