Abstract
In recent decades, collaboration has become increasingly central in the management strategies of private companies due to the complexity of organizational design and workflow and the heterogeneity of professional profiles and knowledge domains. Collaboration is also relevant for public institutions, where the progressive reduction of resources requires an increasingly cooperative approach among actors who are supposed to follow the same socio-economic orientation for the “common good”. Given the growing attention towards this topic, this study implemented and tested an educational tool for stimulating collaborative behaviours and attitudes. The tool is named Totem & Tribe, and it is a sociological-rooted educational game. For testing the game’s reliability and effectiveness in shaping collaborative behaviours and attitudes, a mixed sample of students and entrepreneurs was asked to play within a university setting. The participants were first-year students in Economics and Education at the University of Bergamo and entrepreneurs who participated in the Executive Education Programme organized by the Department of Management Engineering of the same university. Participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire with several questions regarding different aspects of collaboration and competition. The same questionnaire was administered before and after the game (pre and post test). This chapter presents in detail the theoretical and pragmatic characteristics of the game, the testing procedure (design, sample and method) and the main results.
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Notes
- 1.
Game concept, design and development by Doni and Tomelleri (2011).
- 2.
For measuring disposition differences about collaboration and interdependence, selected items from the entrepreneurial aptitude test (TAI) developed by Favretto et al. (2003) and from the cooperation orientation scale developed by Chen et al. (2011) were adopted. The latter was also translated in Italian. For measuring trust among people, selected items from the Organizational Trust Inventory (short version) developed by Cummings and Bromiley (1996) were adopted and translated in Italian.
- 3.
Mother and father are classified as high-educated if they have a high school certificate that allows them to attend the university or a degree.
- 4.
For each selected statements see Table 3.
- 5.
The statements related to trust are: In my opinion, my colleagues are reliable; I know my colleagues will keep their word; I know my colleagues behave honestly with me; I know my colleagues will not deceive me. The answers regarding trust were based on a 5-point scale where 5 meant “strongly disagree”, 4 “disagree”, 3 “neither agree nor disagree”, 2 “agree” and 1 “strongly agree”.
- 6.
The 15 questions used to identify the personality traits are based on those reported in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a survey conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research.
- 7.
The answers reported in the questionnaires administered after the game were used. However, in the literature there is evidence that the personality traits used are stable over time (Caspi et al. 2005).
- 8.
The results are available on request.
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The authors thank Stefano Paleari and Lucio Cassia for their fruitful suggestions and collaboration.
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Grasseni, M., Lusardi, R., Tomelleri, S. (2018). Enhancing Collaboration: Does a Game Make a Difference?. In: Bosio, G., Minola, T., Origo, F., Tomelleri, S. (eds) Rethinking Entrepreneurial Human Capital. Studies on Entrepreneurship, Structural Change and Industrial Dynamics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90548-8_9
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