Antecedents of competitive group formation intention in business education context

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to understand the relationships of complementary specialization, cognitive trust, affective trust, tie strength and similarity with group formation intention. Design/methodology/approach The data have been collected from 30 management students from a batch of 110 students of a premiere Indian business school. To assess the proposed relationship, multiple hierarchical regression was performed on collected data by using SPSS© 20. Findings The obtained results exhibited cognitive trust, affective trust and tie strength as significant predictors of dyadic group formation intention, whereas similarity and complementary specialization were not found. Originality/value The research on group formation is limited, and more particularly the functions of the above-mentioned factors on the group formation intentions of management graduates are yet to generalize. Therefore, present research is an early approach which tries to address the mentioned gap from a social network perspective and considers the group formation and social network literature.