A Study of the Effectiveness of Using Team-Based Learning in Management Classes

Working effectively as a team continues to be an important workplace skill and designing innovative pedagogies for developing this skills is a goal of management education. Building on previous research in team learning, we introduce formal team based learning (TBL) to our classrooms and measure outcomes of quality of team learning, professional development and team satisfaction. We also assess students’ perceived fairness of the work distribution and analyze its effect on these outcomes. Our findings indicate that TBL resulted in increases in the quality of team learning, professional development and team satisfaction. Only team satisfaction was significantly related to perceived fairness, with students who perceived themselves as doing more of the work dissatisfied with the team experience. Perceived fairness did not affect team learning or professional development. We discuss our contributions and provide suggestions for future research.