Achievement Goals and Team Leadership in Online Small Group Learning

Group learning is a common used learning approach in online education. However, there are limited studies addressing how to support online groups from the perspectives of motivation and team leadership. This study attempts to understand how achievement goals and leadership styles could influence collaboration experience and individual performance. The results showed that learners who adopted mastery goals tended to engage in group learning through promoting member relationships and group cohesion whereas leaders who adopted performance goals tended to concentrate on helping group complete tasks. High level of relationship-orientated leadership made performance-approach goal orientation a significant predictor of collaboration experience and reduced the negative effect of performance-avoidance goals on final grade. This study finally provides insights to online group activity design. Introduction Small group learning is a commonly used instructional approach in online education. There are a few challenges that have been discerned such as the reduction of social and contextual cues, trust issue among team members, feeling of isolation, and technical uncertainty (DeRosa, Hantula, Kock, & D’Arcy, 2004). From a team leadership perspective, research has found that virtual team leadership is necessary for quality team performance, however at the same time how leaders or leadership functions in virtual teams is still under exploration (Avolio, Walumbwa, & Weber, 2009; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005). What makes the challenges even more critical is that leadership in online classrooms are sometimes not explicitly specified by the instructor. In this scenario, leadership roles are little structured and group process is weakly scaffold by the instructor. Informal leadership will gradually emerge in effective online groups, whereas some other groups might stay leaderless towards the end of the group life. The goal of the current study is to understand how emergent leadership in formal online educational settings affect group healthiness as well as individual academic achievement. Motivation in individual and group learning In academic settings, students’ achievement motivation is strongly associated with how they engage in learning activities and further academic performance. Goal orientations refer to the reason why students study. The classic model differentiates three goal orientations: mastery, performance-approach (PAP), and performanceavoidance (PAV) goal orientation (Middleton & Midgley, 1997). Mastery goals represent students’ main focus on understanding subject content and developing competence, whereas performance goals reflect the focus on demonstrating competence and how ability will be judged relative to others. The main difference between PAP and PAV goals is striving to outperform others versus striving to avoid doing poorly than others. Research has found a volume of benefits of adopting mastery goals for its positive influence on learning interest, persistence, psychological well-being, and so forth (e.g., Linnenbrink-Garcia & Pintrich, 2000). Particularly, students adopting mastery goals are more likely prefer group collaboration than those who adopt performance goals (Elliot et al., 2016). On the other hand, PAP goals are associated with lower performance, superficial learning strategy use, and fear of failure. Online education has shown its advantages in reducing social comparison among learners which is promising in terms of encouraging mastery goal adoption. Leadership as engagement in group learning In earlier literature studying leadership in face-to-face teams, there is a classic dichotomous model viewing leadership as functional acts: task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership (e.g., Stogdill, 1969). In nonacademic settings, a typical task-oriented leader (T-leadership) focuses on completing tasks and tends to be more directive, autocratic, and critical, whereas relationship-oriented leader (R-leadership) tends to be considerate, permissive, democratic, and person-oriented. Research has shown the contingency effect of the two leadership style on team effectiveness. Generally, T-leadership style would be more effective in extreme team situations (e.g., members are not very close or very close to each other), whereas R-leadership styles are more effective than T-leadership when member relationship is intermediate (Strube & Garcia, 1981). This model has ICLS 2018 Proceedings 965 © ISLS also been applied in a computer-mediated communication environment (e.g., Yamaguchi, Bos, & Olson, 2002; Xie, Sun, & Lu, 2015; Xie, Hensley, Law, & Sun, 2017). Particularly, in online groups without formal leaders, multiple group members can act like both taskand relationshiporiented leaders. At the same time, group members may not actively engaged in leadership roles. Therefore, under the perspective of leadership as shared leadership roles among group members, this study attempts to understand how leadership as an active investigation in group learning could affect collaboration experience and individual learning outcomes. Research Questions Synthesizing theories and empirical findings, this study attempts to study the following research questions: 1. Can goal orientations predict leadership styles, group cohesion, and individual learning outcome? 2. Does leadership moderate the effect of goal orientations on group cohesion and individual learning outcome?