Interdisciplinary Student Teams Projects: A Case Study

1. INTRODUCTION Organizations rely on teamwork to accomplish the work that ultimately makes the firm thrive and maintain success (Chen et al., 2008). Thus, it is important for college graduates to possess the skills needed to help them function effectively in workplace teams. The safe environment of the classroom is a place where students can learn to be effective team members. It has been stated that teamwork needs to be considered a basic critical skill. It should be taught just as reading, writing and mathematics are taught; and, if this were the case, students and corporations would be well served (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2007). University professors have strived to replicate the corporate environment by having students work in teams to accomplish course learning objectives. One important aspect of today's workplace is that teams consist of a mosaic of interdisciplinary members with diverse functional areas as their primary responsibility. Such teams are now at the core of how work is accomplished in today's corporations. Thus, students should learn how to function effectively as members of interdisciplinary teams. The purpose of this paper is to describe an interdisciplinary group technical project designed by two professors to help students learn how to function in interdisciplinary teams. Interdisciplinary teams, as the term is utilized in this paper, refers to combining students with differing undergraduate majors; from two different courses; and two different graduate degree programs. As part of the interdisciplinary technical group project described in this paper, Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Master of Science in Accounting (MSA) students were required to collaborate as team members. This paper may be beneficial in assisting other faculty who may seek to initiate such teams. In the related literature, this paper describes the need for such interdisciplinary learning environments. This section is followed by a description of the students; a description of the interdisciplinary group technical project and how it was implemented; team formation and preparation for membership; and course objectives met through participation in the project. Lastly, the project learning outcomes are discussed. 2. RELATED LITERATURE The numerous benefits of teams have long been known in the workplace. Many different industries publish articles in popular press indicating the importance of teamwork and often include steps or factors that are vital to team success (Rutter, 2007). For example, in a garment plant that implemented teams, average productivity increased by 18% with 14% being directly attributable to teams (Hamilton, Nickerson, and Owan, 2003). Another study looked at U.S. steel mini mills and found that teams raise productivity as the production process gets more complex (Boning, Ichniowski, and Shaw, 2007). In their field study, Falk and Ichino (2006) used zero financial rewards and a dull task of stuffing envelopes and found the average worker productivity was higher when each person worked in the same room as another person than when they worked in isolation. The least productive workers were the most affected by working in a group. The benefits of teams can be seen in many environments including the educational environment. Teachers have found that cooperative work among students can increase learning (Jensen, Moore, and Hatch, 2002). However, research also indicates that organizational teams are often not as effective as they should be (Kozlowsky and Ilgen, 2007; Rutter, 2007). A number of research studies have looked at what makes a team successful. Teams that were the most productive were also the most satisfying team of which to be a member (Napier and Johnson, 2007). Other researchers have examined the influence of personality styles (Gorla and Lam, 2004) and assigned or self-selected membership (Brabston and Street, 2005) on team success. …