The role of member friendship and external discipline in shaping team trust, cooperation and performance in student collaborative competitions

Purpose This study aims to empirically investigate the impact of interpersonal rapport and external regulatory mechanisms on collaborative dynamics and competitive outcomes in collegiate team-based contests. Design/methodology/approach The research employs a dataset consisting of 665 validated responses from participants across various competitive team events. Analytical methods are used to examine the relationship between interpersonal rapport, external regulatory mechanisms, and key dependent variables such as intra-team trust, collaborative efficacy and objective performance metrics. Findings The results indicate that both interpersonal rapport and externally imposed disciplinary frameworks significantly influence intra-team trust and collaborative efficacy, which includes procedural satisfaction and outcome evaluation. However, no significant correlations were found between these antecedent variables and objective performance metrics, particularly competition ranking attainment. This suggests that competitive success may be primarily mediated by other factors such as member competency profiles, resource accessibility indices and adversarial team performance levels. Originality/value This study provides novel insights into the complex interplay between interpersonal and regulatory factors in team-based contests. It highlights the need for future research to incorporate multivariate analytical models to better understand the relative contributions of latent variables in optimizing both psychosocial cohesion and objective achievement benchmarks in high-performance teams.