Why Can’t I Choose My Teammates in Your Classes?

Students often ask me why they can’t pick their own teammates in my classes. In many classes, choosing your own group is common, and I used to prefer it too. But over time, I noticed that most students select friends or people who seem similar to them. This is a normal human tendency—called similarity or affinity bias—but it can accidentally create cliques or limit opportunities to meet new people or work adequately with individuals that are different from us.

To give students a more valuable learning experience, I moved to an evidence‑based system where I assign teams. This lets you work with classmates you might not interact with otherwise. Diverse groups—whether in gender, background, major, skills, or perspectives—better mirror real workplaces. In most jobs, you don’t get to choose your early‑career teams, and you will often collaborate with people who have very different experiences from yours. Practicing this in college helps you become a stronger, more adaptable teammate in your professional career.

Why I Use Assigned, Diverse Teams

In this course, I build teams using specific demographic and behavioral criteria rather than allowing self‑selection. Research shows that diverse groups outperform more homogeneous ones on complex tasks and that assigned teams often share work more fairly, avoid “social loafing,” learn more from one another, and benefit from a wider mix of ideas.

My Goal

My goal is to prepare you for professional environments by giving you practice working across differences. By collaborating with a broad range of peers, you develop important communication, teamwork, and conflict‑management skills that employers value highly.

The Research Foundation

Reduced "Social Loafing": Research shows that instructor-assigned groups often exhibit higher accountability than friend-based groups, leading to more equitable work distribution (Maguire & Keceli, 2023).

Knowledge Spillovers: Interacting with peers from different demographics and disciplines has been shown to improve individual learning outcomes and exam performance (Hansen, Owan, & Pan, 2015).

Collective Intelligence: A team’s success is driven by “Collective Intelligence”—a factor enhanced by social sensitivity and a wide range of perspectives rather than just the individual IQ of its members (Janssens, Meslec, & Leenders, 2022).

References

• Chapman, K. J., Meuter, M. L., Toy, D., & Wright, L. K. (2006). Can’t we pick our own groups? The influence of group selection method on group dynamics and outcomes. Journal of Education for Business, 81(3), 150–157. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562905284872 

• Dachner, A. M., & Beatty, J. E. (2023). A selected review of exemplary diversity articles published in the Journal of Management Education. Journal of Management Education, 47(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/10525629231178798 

• Hansen, Z., Owan, H., & Pan, J. (2015). The impact of group diversity on class performance: Evidence from college classrooms. Education Economics, 23(2), 238-258. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1048197

• Janssens, M., Meslec, N., & Leenders, R. T. A. J. (2022). Collective intelligence in teams: Contextualizing collective intelligent behavior over time. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 989572. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.989572

• Maguire, D., & Keceli, Y. (2024). The impact of formation and diversity on student team conflict. Active Learning in Higher Education, 25(3), 409-423. https://doi.org/10.1177/14697874221144998