The Effects of Team-Skills Guidance on Student Project Teams

This paper reports an experiment investigating the effects of team-skills guidance on accounting student team performance and outcomes. We examine how in-class team skills discussion sessions with a course instructor impacts student perceptions of the usefulness of team work, team performance, and team project outcomes. We find that while students perceive positive benefits from engaging in team work, those who receive in-class team-skills guidance perceive fewer benefits. Students who undergo such in-class team-skills guidance also rate their own contributions to the team project, as well as the contributions of their team members, lower than students who do not. These findings suggest that students who receive in-class team-skills guidance have higher expectations of themselves and of their team mates, and are more critical in their evaluation of how the team worked together and the quality of the team project submitted. We discuss the implications of our findings.