Social loafing in student entrepreneurship teams

This paper assesses the level of social loafing which occurs in an entrepreneurship education context, using a sample of 310 student teams from an Irish University. While teamwork is a common element of most deliveries of entrepreneurship education (Hytti & O’Gorman 2004), there are few studies which explore the actual impact of the team on performance in this context. In entrepreneurship more generally it has been found that team-level variables has an impact on team effectiveness (Hill et al. 2013) however studies like these are limited in the field of entrepreneurship education. As team-led entrepreneurship is gaining both academic and wider interest, as seen in the review by Klotz et al. (2014), the teamwork dynamic in an educational setting of entrepreneurship may have discrete characteristics, warranting its own research inquiry.