Nevertheless, it is not just social-support, but rather the presence of both
social-support and task-participation that are requirements for a smooth
functioning team. While AL has been shown to positively influence important
teamwork attitudes such as these, even up to 18 months after the AL
experience (Hattie et al., 1997), the presence of underlying competitive attitudes
in AL participants might derail such positive influences on teamwork. Given
the prevalence of the two competitive Kiasu attitudes in Singapore, their
interactions with AL should be examined for possible effects on teamwork.
Specifically, how could competitive attitudes such as Kiasu-positive and
Kiasu-negative affect changes in task-participation and social-support
attitudes that may arise from an AL experience? First, as Kiasu-negative
revolved around the idea of preventing others from getting ahead of oneself,
this should increase non-cooperative behaviors, possibly behaviors such as
withholding information from others in order to ensure that they do not
outperform the Kiasu-negative person. Since such behaviors are contrary to
task-participation attitudes (helpfulness towards task needs of other members),
Kiasu-negative should therefore be negatively related to task-participation
improvements that may arise from AL experiences. Similarly, the
uncooperative Kiasu-negative attitude should not be supportive of other
team members’ emotional/social needs, because at its core is the desire for
failure of others in order to retain one’s lead over them. Therefore,
Kiasu-negative should be negatively related to social-support attitudinal
improvements. Thus the following two hypotheses