Conflict Is Good

Sample

The study was carried out in a university for professional education in the province of Limburg, The Netherlands. Forty six teams having four to six members were asked to participate in this study. Each of these teams was involved in similar educational activities in several domains. The university offers a wide range of educational activities with a preeminent practical character and follows a strategy focused on small-scale and high quality education in three major cities in The Netherlands. The teaching philosophy puts emphasis on practice oriented work and students are asked to deal with real projects in order to develop their technical and analytical skills. Therefore, the teams involved in this research were asked to deal with real life projects in several domains in which they were specialized. A first set of teams did a market research project in catering management (fourteen teams). The aim was to develop and carry out a market study concerning a particular product and to write a report with recommendations about expanding and increasing the exploitation possibilities for this particular product. A second set of teams (sixteen teams) did a building exploitation project and they were asked to make the complete analytical inventory of a building, to analyze the architectural features of the building, the installations, technical and inventory elements and to report their analyses about the way in which these features are used. A third set of teams (six teams) did a project in brokerage with the special aim to gain insights into the practice of housing management and the mediation of real estate. During this project the teams had to chart the daily practice of housing management in a company and then write a report with their findings concerning the strategic phases of house sales in the investigated companies. Finally a set of ten teams did a project on city management, in which the students had to write a report containing strategic advice concerning the exploitation of two city blocks in a situation in which the city center should be re-designed.

From the total of 234 respondents that received the questionnaire, 162 questionnaires (items were translated in Dutch) were usable after the response rate was computed in each group. The rule for inclusion was that at least 80% of the group members returned valid questionnaires. The groups with a response rate lower than 80% were dropped from the analyses and the final sample of teams consisted of 37 teams with an average of five members (ranging from four to six).