Team Formation Strategies In Higher Education

The development of teamwork skills has emerged as one of the key issues to be addressed in Higher Education studies. It is widely agreed that several problems may arise in teams due to factors such as interpersonal conflicts, lack of organization, and lack of communication. In order to overcome these problems, several team formation methodologies have been proposed in the literature, with the goal of obtaining high performance teams. Some of these methodologies rely on the analysis of individuals' behaviours when working with others, while other approaches rely on the analysis of the personality traits of individuals. Both perspectives have been largely studied from the theoretical point of view and also, from their application to real contexts. However, there are no studies that clearly demonstrate the benefits of specific team formation strategies in comparison to others. In this paper, we present our experience with regards to different team formation strategies in higher education that have been applied during several academic years. These strategies mainly focus on behaviour and personality traits applied to real contexts.