Relation Of Collective Efficacy Beliefs To Group Cohesion And Performance In Student Project Teams

This study extends Bandura’s 1 concept of collective efficacy to the context of student project teams in engineering education. Collective efficacy refers to team members’ beliefs about the ability of their team to perform its tasks effectively. Members of student project teams in an introductory engineering design course completed measures of their teams’ collective efficacy, cohesion, and performance. Course instructors also independently rated each team’s performance. Findings indicated that collective efficacy was strongly related to students’ ratings of their teams’ cohesion and performance, both at the individual and group levels of analysis. Collective efficacy was also moderately related to instructors’ ratings of team performance. We consider the implications of these findings for further research and practice involving team functioning.