91 / 188
89
conclude that interdisciplinary collaboration combined with service learning provides
great benefits to the students. This cooperative teaching approach to international service
fosters acquisition of attitudes, experiences and skills that benefit all parties involved.
Students will continue to develop their own evolving set of principles from the school
service learning educational philosophy and interdisciplinary cooperation.
Kistruck et al.: Cooperation vs. competition: alternative goal structures
for motivating groups in a resource scarce environment [15]
The results also suggest that cooperative goal structures can be highly motivating
when groups are unfamiliar with one another. The reason for this outcome is that
cooperating with unfamiliar groups can provide access to valuable and rare knowledge
within such settings. Broadly speaking, social interdependence theory suggests that
a group’s motivation level can be affected by whether their goals are structured positively
(“cooperation”) versus negatively (“competition”).
However, if collaborative goal structures in the BOP (the base-of-the-pyramid –
a term used to describe impoverished regions of the world where the public infrastructure
necessary for large-scale social and economic progress is largely deficient) are
psychologically associated with notions of “necessity,” while competitive goal structures
are more “aspirational” in nature, we hypothesise that competitive goal structures are
likely to be viewed as a more alluring option, and fuel motivation to a greater degree.
More specifically, a group presented with a task that involves competing with another
group in the BOP is likely to perceive the task as an opportunity to experience feelings of
pride and excitement. As a result, group members will put forth greater personal effort,
and will be motivated to coordinate with one another to the extent that it increases their
chances of experiencing such positive emotions. Comparatively, groups presented with
a cooperative goal structure in such a setting, at least in the absence of some sort of crisis,
will be likely to perceive the task more as an added burden to their lives.
There is a growing consensus that cooperative goal structures are more effective at
motivating groups than competitive goal structures. However, such results are based largely
on studies conducted in highly-controlled settings where participants were provided with
the necessary resources to accomplish their assigned task. In an attempt to extend the
boundary conditions of current theoretical predictions, we undertook a field experiment
within a base-of-the-pyramid setting where resource scarcity is extremely high. Specifically,
we collected data on 44 communities within rural Sri Lanka. The communities were tasked
with contributing a portion of their resources to the construction of a school building;
24 were assigned to a competition condition and 20 to a cooperation condition. The
results of our field experiment, and subsequent follow-up interviews and focus groups,
collectively suggest that competitive goal structures generally lead to higher levels of
motivation within a resource scarce environment. However, our results also suggest that
cooperative goal structures can be highly motivating when groups are unfamiliar with
one another, as cooperating with unfamiliar groups can provide access to valuable and
rare knowledge within such settings.
Although a consensus has been forming that cooperative goal structures may be
a more powerful motivator, the results of our study suggest that such conclusions may
be bounded by the setting in which most studies have taken place. While our own study