Enhancing Collaboration: Does a Game Make a Difference?

Abstract

In recent decades, collaboration has become increasingly central in the management strategies of private companies due to the complexity of organizational design and workflow and the heterogeneity of professional profiles and knowledge domains. Collaboration is also relevant for public institutions, where the progressive reduction of resources requires an increasingly cooperative approach among actors who are supposed to follow the same socio-economic orientation for the “common good”. Given the growing attention towards this topic, this study implemented and tested an educational tool for stimulating collaborative behaviours and attitudes. The tool is named Totem & Tribe, and it is a sociological-rooted educational game. For testing the game’s reliability and effectiveness in shaping collaborative behaviours and attitudes, a mixed sample of students and entrepreneurs was asked to play within a university setting. The participants were first-year students in Economics and Education at the University of Bergamo and entrepreneurs who participated in the Executive Education Programme organized by the Department of Management Engineering of the same university. Participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire with several questions regarding different aspects of collaboration and competition. The same questionnaire was administered before and after the game (pre and post test). This chapter presents in detail the theoretical and pragmatic characteristics of the game, the testing procedure (design, sample and method) and the main results.