Sustainable Solutions for SCM

conclude that interdisciplinary collaboration combined with service learning provides great benefits to the students. This cooperative teaching approach to international service fosters acquisition of attitudes, experiences and skills that benefit all parties involved. Students will continue to develop their own evolving set of principles from the school service learning educational philosophy and interdisciplinary cooperation. Kistruck et al.: Cooperation vs. competition: alternative goal structures for motivating groups in a resource scarce environment [15] The results also suggest that cooperative goal structures can be highly motivating when groups are unfamiliar with one another. The reason for this outcome is that cooperating with unfamiliar groups can provide access to valuable and rare knowledge within such settings. Broadly speaking, social interdependence theory suggests that a group’s motivation level can be affected by whether their goals are structured positively (“cooperation”) versus negatively (“competition”). However, if collaborative goal structures in the BOP (the base-of-the-pyramid – a term used to describe impoverished regions of the world where the public infrastructure necessary for large-scale social and economic progress is largely deficient) are psychologically associated with notions of “necessity,” while competitive goal structures are more “aspirational” in nature, we hypothesise that competitive goal structures are likely to be viewed as a more alluring option, and fuel motivation to a greater degree. More specifically, a group presented with a task that involves competing with another group in the BOP is likely to perceive the task as an opportunity to experience feelings of pride and excitement. As a result, group members will put forth greater personal effort, and will be motivated to coordinate with one another to the extent that it increases their chances of experiencing such positive emotions. Comparatively, groups presented with a cooperative goal structure in such a setting, at least in the absence of some sort of crisis, will be likely to perceive the task more as an added burden to their lives. There is a growing consensus that cooperative goal structures are more effective at motivating groups than competitive goal structures. However, such results are based largely on studies conducted in highly-controlled settings where participants were provided with the necessary resources to accomplish their assigned task. In an attempt to extend the boundary conditions of current theoretical predictions, we undertook a field experiment within a base-of-the-pyramid setting where resource scarcity is extremely high. Specifically, we collected data on 44 communities within rural Sri Lanka. The communities were tasked with contributing a portion of their resources to the construction of a school building; 24 were assigned to a competition condition and 20 to a cooperation condition. The results of our field experiment, and subsequent follow-up interviews and focus groups, collectively suggest that competitive goal structures generally lead to higher levels of motivation within a resource scarce environment. However, our results also suggest that cooperative goal structures can be highly motivating when groups are unfamiliar with one another, as cooperating with unfamiliar groups can provide access to valuable and rare knowledge within such settings. Although a consensus has been forming that cooperative goal structures may be a more powerful motivator, the results of our study suggest that such conclusions may be bounded by the setting in which most studies have taken place. While our own study

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