Antecedents of Satisfaction with Teamwork in Higher Education: An Empirical Study

Developing a theoretical framework to understand undergraduate student teamwork dynamics has always been a topic of interest for educational researchers. Essentially, this is because teamwork is seen as a method for learning and professional development as many companies allocate their work in teams. Hence, there is a need for researchers to look into the underlying factors that can influence teamwork effectiveness among university students. Although there exist a few studies on identifying the antecedents of satisfaction with teamwork, this study intends to analyses the influence of task factors, such as workload, and individual factors, such as collaborative behaviour, on satisfaction with teamwork and expected quality respectively. In addition, the study was also employed to understand the role of team cohesiveness and individuals having knowledge, skills and abilities on satisfaction with teamwork and expected quality respectively. Data were collected from 151 students who are studying their undergraduate course in Indian universities. The proposed causal relationship was examined with SmartPLS 3, as it allows us to analyse multiple causal relationships in a single framework. The findings show that workload has significant negative relationship with both satisfaction with teamwork and team cohesiveness. Whereas, team cohesiveness in turn has a significant positive relationship with satisfaction with teamwork. Similarly, collaborative behaviour has emerged as significant predictor of individual’s knowledge, skills and abilities, and expected quality from a teamwork. In turn, it was identified that individual’s knowledge, skills and abilities could influence both team cohesiveness and expected quality. The findings of the study have implication to both the administrators and teachers involved in designing and deploying the coursework to university students.