How Individual Performance Affects Variability of Peer Evaluations in Classroom Teams: A Distributive Justice Perspective

Business school courses often require team projects, both for pedagogical reasons as well as to prepare students for the kinds of team-based activities that are common in organizations these days. However, social loafing is a common problem in teams, and peer evaluations by team members are sometimes used in such team settings to assess individuals’ contributions. We propose that high and low team performers differ in terms of their ability and motivation to make distinctions in their teammates’ performance, and consequently they differ in how they evaluate their teammates’ performances. Specifically, we predict that high performers will provide evaluations of teammates that distinguish between those who did well and those who performed poorly, and thus high performers’ ratings will exhibit greater variability. In contrast, we predict that low performers will fail to distinguish among teammates’ levels of performance, and thus will provide evaluations that are lower in variability. Using latent growth modeling, we demonstrate that high and low performers do indeed differ as predicted in the variability of the points they allocate to teammates. The pedagogical implications of this positive relationship between team members’ performance and variability in points allocated are discussed.