Law Students’ Pro-Socialness, Self-Efficacy, and Performance in Times of Change

Abstract

In a once strictly patriarchal society, now yearning to establish gender equity, female law students are caught in a firestorm between the old and the new. They are expected to contribute as much as men to their society. Their success rests not only on being competent connoisseurs of the law of their country but also on possessing professional skills that are key to the delivery of legal services. One of such skills is the ability to work with others. The present study examined the extent to which teamwork performance (holistically measured by course grades) is related to personal dispositions, such as self-efficacy and pro-socialness. Participants were members of an understudied population of female law students of Saudi Arabian descent who had only recently been granted the opportunity to pursue law careers. The students completed self-efficacy and pro-socialness scales. Responses were linked to grades from a teamwork course. In this study, students’ teamwork performance increased with self-efficacy and pro-socialness. Most importantly, the students could be differentiated into a low-functioning group characterized by poor self-efficacy, pro-socialness, and teamwork performance and a high-functioning group exhibiting the opposite pattern. These findings suggest that training devoted to teamwork skills may be more or less successful depending on the recipients’ dispositions. They further suggest that additional, more intense training should be dedicated to students in the low-functioning group to optimize their future delivery of legal services.