ABSTRACT
As suggested by scholarly literature, the integration of customers, students or other non-professionals is useful in order to assess new business opportunities and strengthen the innovative capabilities of a company. However, a close collaboration with non-professionals also raises the need for formalized control mechanisms which are necessary to ensure effective teamwork and goal attainment. Although the crucial importance of formalized control is nowadays well recognized in scholarly literature, its impact on teamwork quality and task performance has never been directly assessed in the context of student teams. Our study aims at closing this research gap. For this purpose, we investigate the impact of supervision on task performance and teamwork quality in student software design teams. Our results show that there is a positive impact of professional supervision on teamwork quality and task performance moderated by team size, suggesting that professional supervision is beneficial for small student teams but unfavorable for large teams.
Keywords
Student Teams, Supervision, Task Performance,Team Management, Teamwork Quality