An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Social Ostracism In Undergraduate And Task Interdependence On Team Learning Performance

In the knowledge-based economy times with increasingly fierce organization competition, team has becoming a basic work unit of organization change and innovation. As the widely application of team-working, investigating the factors and internal mechanism of team performance in undergraduate has become a hot topic among the researchers and organization managers.Among the factors which impact team performance, social ostracism and task interdependence have not come into the researchers’ sights. As a deep roots of social problem, social ostracism has various implications of economic, political and cultural. Researches in the area of sociology and psychology usually investigates the negative consequences of social ostracism to the society or individuals from a macro or micro view. Researches in the field of organizational behavior have been paid attention to the relationship between workplace ostracism and performance. However, these studies have not yet concerned about the impact of social ostracism to team output from the team level. As a characteristic of a working task, task interdependence can be designed and manipulated by researcher. It determined the extent of interaction behavior in performing tasks, could also have significant influence on team output. Above all, this article used psychological experimental methodology to explore the impact of social ostracism and task interdependence to team learning performance, as well as the mechanism among them.We used 2(social inclusion, social ostracism)×2(low task interdependence, high task interdependence)between subjects design to test our hypotheses. The samples of this study were 82 teams(two males and one female per team), which consisted of 246 undergraduates totally. Each team was asked to finish a task named as ‘Chinese stroke-character-sentence making’. Social ostracism was manipulated by ‘O’ train demonstration, and through controls the materials of team task to manipulate task interdependence. The results indicated that:(1) social ostracism had a negative positive effect on team learning performance;(2) task interdependence had a significant positive effect on team learning performance;(3) task interdependence moderated the effect of social ostracism on team performance;(4) perceived positive social connection had the mediating effects between social ostracism, task interdependence and team learning performance.