Team Personality Diversity: The Key to High Performance?

These past years, work psychologist researchers focused their studies profoundly on how to increase the performance of teams at work. One key element to attain this success is the team personality diversity: the variance or differences among team members for a particular personality. Teams that are high in terms of Team Personality Diversity (TPD) are usually referred to as heterogeneous.

To explain this mechanism, Neuman G. and colleagues conducted a study in 1999 on the relationship between work-team personality composition and the job performance of teams. The question was whether similar personality traits (for example, having only extraverted individuals within a team) enhance performance or diverse personality traits (a mix of introverts and extroverts) were more effective. The first one is called supplementary model while the second one is called complementary model.

Consequently, what Neuman G. and colleagues found in their study, is that across the set of Big Five traits (Extraversion, Openness, Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness), TPD was positively related to team performance, and therefore, a complementary model (combining different personality traits within a team) best describes the high-performing work teams. Especially, diversity in extraversion and emotional stability improves performance, aligning with past research on effective work teams. Teams with varied levels of these traits perform better, as different members can fill complementary roles. Homogeneous teams in these traits may face role conflicts, reducing effectiveness.

Based on these findings, thinking about team selection, Hogan Assessments can help companies combine different personality traits together, for teams to be more effective. More specifically, a focus on the Adjustment and the Sociability scales can be interesting to consider.