The Role of Team Personality in Team Effectiveness and Performance

Abstract

An individual’s personality is among the most established predictors of job performance, and personality factors in aggregate are predictive of team performance across a range of team types. However, a recent review of a decade’s worth of quantitative and mixed-methods research articles on science teams identified no empirical studies on the impact of personality on science teams (Hall et al. 2018). As such, there is a need to look to the broader teams literature to learn what we can about how personality may impact science teams. This chapter provides an introduction to the most commonly used framework for understanding personality, the Five Factor Model. It then summarizes what is known from the teams literature about the influence of personality factors on team effectiveness, and considers the potential interactions of personality with team processes and emergent states. The chapter reflects on how personality traits may uniquely impact science teams given their interactions with key influences that are specific to scientific work, including scientific goals, the academic environment, and the culture of the scientific enterprise. Finally, the chapter recommends future conceptual and methodological research directions to advance our understanding of the influence of personality factors, as they interact with one another and a range of other critical influencing factors, on the effectiveness of science teams.