Personality Impact on (Start-Up) Team Performance

So we’ve been looking into the “science of rapport” here at Meeteor, and thought we’d share some of our findings.  Everyone knows that personality has to have some form of impact on group effectiveness, but we wanted to dig into it a bit more.   We wanted to know what personality traits mattered, and what impact they had, specifically, on group cohesion and effectiveness.

 As most business school students would know, researchers have concluded that there are five basic personality traits (called the “Big Five”) that are common to *all* humans across cultures.    Those are; Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience.    

What we were curious about at Meeteor is the degree to which the Big Five can help predict team cohesion and proficiency.  The literature has slightly conflicting results, which we detail below :

Extraversion :   [Conclusion: No Correlation]

Recent findings have concluded that there is no relationship between the average extroversion of a team, and its performance.  Furtheremore, contrary with the notion that highly extroverted members would be complimented by lower extraverted members, the relationship between variability in team extraversion and team performance was also negligible.   

Conscientiousness:  [Conclusion: Positive Correlation]

Studies proved that the elevation of conscientiousness in a team was related to team performance.  Studies also found that variability in conscientiousness was negatives related to team performance, leading us to conclude that the more similar team members are the better their teams performance.  Therefore, it’s best to have a team with a high level of average conscientiousness with little variability between members.

Agreeableness: [Conclusion: Positive Correlation] 

Studies have found that there is a positive correlation between agreeableness and team performance, and that one disagreeable member can indeed disrupt the social harmony of the team.    There’s thus a negative relationship between variability in agreeableness and team performance – the more similar team members are in their agreeableness, the better they will perform. 

Emotional Stability:  [Conclusion: Variability in team may be a factor.  No correlation otherwise.  ]

Overall findings were that there is no relationship between emotional stability and overall team performance.  One study did find that in student teams, specifically, the more similar the group is in emotional stability, the better their performance. 

Openness to Experience:  [Conclusion: No Correlation]

We found no correlation between openness to experience and team performance.    

If you’re networking to build a team, you may want to keep the above personality traits in consideration..... 

Sources : 

Special thanks to Adam Grant  for his help in researching this issue!

Suzanne T. Bell, "Deep Level Composition Variables as Predictors of Team Performance: A Meta-Analysis" (Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 92, No3.  2007), pp 595-615.

Miranda Peeters, Harrie Van Tuijl, Christel Rutte, Isabelle Reymen, "Personality and Team Performance: A Meta-Analysis" (European Journal of Personality, May 2006), pp 377-396.

Bruce Barry and Greg Stewart, "Composition, Process and Performance in Self-Managed Groups: The Role of Personality" (Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 82, No. 1, 1997), pp 62-78.

Murray Barrick, Greg Stewart, Mitchell Neubert, Michael Mount,  "Relating Member Ability and Personality to Work-Team Processes and Team Effectiveness" (Journal of Applied Psychology Vol. 83, No. 3, 1998), pp 377-391.