Teamwork: Assessment of teamwork competence in higher education

Teamwork is both a competence highly demanded among workers and an academic field with an extensive specialized literature. Based on this knowledge that comes from the study of organizational behavior, this communication presents a model to understand teamwork in higher education settings. The theoretical model considers structural components (i.e., task interdependence and task uncertainty), processes (i.e., team development and team climate for learning) and results (i.e., team effectiveness). Moreover, an assessment tool (and attitudinal questionnaire with 42 items-Likert scale with a range from 1 to 7) is also presented to measure these critical components that can allow us to distinguish between effective and ineffective teams in higher education. Preliminary results of the application of these tools to 18 team students show good consistency values of the scales used being able to distinguish among teams. Additionally, we propose a procedure to obtain aggregated measures per group from the members' responses considering the degree of agreement among them.