Influence of Individual and Team Rewards on Collaboration and Productivity of Team

Due to an increased globalization in modern system development, there is a growing need for engineers to collaborate with other engineers in distant locations, in different organizations, and across different disciplines. An effective collaboration among engineers is the key to successful system development and engineering projects. A cross-functional team is an example. The need for collaboration in real engineering environment has resulted in increasing numbers of team-based projects in undergraduate and graduate programs. This paper uses an economic prisoner\u27s dilemma game to investigate how students decide to collaborate in hypothetical team projects under different individual and team reward schemes. Experiment results suggest that individual rewards may significantly reduce students\u27 intention to collaborate with their teammates. Lack of collaboration resulted in lower productivity in the prisoner\u27s dilemma framework