Antecedents of competitive group formation intention in business education context

Purpose: This paper aims to understand the relationships of complementary specialization, cognitive trust, affective trust, tie strength and similarity with group formation intention. Design/methodology/approach: The data have been collected from 30 management students from a batch of 110 students of a premiere Indian business school. To assess the proposed relationship, multiple hierarchical regression was performed on collected data by using SPSS© 20. Findings: The obtained results exhibited cognitive trust, affective trust and tie strength as significant predictors of dyadic group formation intention, whereas similarity and complementary specialization were not found. Originality/value: The research on group formation is limited, and more particularly the functions of the above-mentioned factors on the group formation intentions of management graduates are yet to generalize. Therefore, present research is an early approach which tries to address the mentioned gap from a social network perspective and considers the group formation and social network literature.