Motivation matters: The role of achievement, affiliation, and power needs in digital peer collaboration among business school students

Collaboration is increasingly recognized as a core competency in both educational and professional contexts, particularly within current management education where online group work has become prevalent. Despite its importance, student engagement in online collaborative learning remains inconsistent, with motivation identified as a key but underexplored factor influencing participation. Prior research has largely neglected the motivational dynamics underpinning students' intentions and actual behaviors in digital group settings, especially among diverse student populations such as full-time and part-time MBA students. To address this gap, we integrate McClelland's Theory of Needs (encompassing the needs for achievement, affiliation, and power) with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to investigate how these motivational needs shape students' intentions and behaviors in online peer collaboration. We adopted a time-lagged research design, using a two-wave online survey and convenience sampling to collect data from 279 students enrolled in four business schools in Bangkok, Thailand. Structural equation modeling analysis empirically supports a U-shaped relationship between digital peer collaboration intention and actual collaboration, challenging traditional linear assumptions. Furthermore, the need for achievement and affiliation positively influenced collaboration intention, whereas the need for power exhibited no significant association. Differences between full-time and part-time students emerged regarding the impact of the need for power on collaboration intention. These findings advance understanding of the motivational mechanisms driving online collaboration and underscore the necessity of tailoring engagement strategies to different student groups in management education.