Nowadays, collaborative skills have become an important graduate attribute for future highly educated professionals, partly due to the growing knowledge economy (Edmondson, 2012). As a result, higher education intends to educate ‘excellent collaborators’ and promote ‘excellent collaboration’. Little is known about what factors result in efficient student-group behavior that can result in an effective group result (Decuyper, Dochy, & Van den Bossche, 2010). Previous research that considered students’ collaborative behavior focused mainly on behavior at group level (Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012) or at the individual roles of the team members (Senior & Swailes, 1998), but not on the interaction between individual contribution and team process as a whole. This study intents to help open the ‘black box’ of collaboration processes in a mixed-methods design that combines a process-oriented approach on individual level and team level with an effect-oriented approach to find out how individual behavior and team processes are interrelated to result in an effective team result. Nine groups of three students per group (N=27) were filmed during two days of collaborative work. The students were enrolled in a Sports, Management, and Business program and collaborated on their initial ideas for the development of an organizational business plan. The video data will be thematically analyzed using the Act4Teams coding scheme (Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012). The findings of this study provide insights in students’ actual behavior while collaborating on a task. In the follow up of this paper, the results will be combined with the team members’ potential for excellence to find out what combination of team members constitute an efficient and effective team. These findings might be helpful in setting guidelines for the collaboration education of future professionals in order to educate students to become good or even excellent collaborators.

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