Personality plus or minus: It can go either way with teamwork

Managers tend to focus on skills and knowledge when assembling teams, but management Professor Jeff LePine’s research suggests that personalities should be factored in as well. LePine was among the first scholars to conduct research and publish papers linking the personality of team members to their team’s performance. He found that while personality impacts individual performance, it plays an even greater role in team performance.

Pablo Picasso once said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” Try telling that to the corporate world, where the proliferation of the almighty team has taken over as the way things get done. And, chances are, they’re getting done in an “open” workspace where no one gets solitude … or individual office walls, for that matter.

Teamwork has become so pervasive that virtually all corporate workers engage in it at some point in their jobs, according to management Professor Jeff LePine. Are we better workers in teams? Do we get more done? That depends a lot on personalities, LePine has found. As with individual workers, personality traits and issues can make or break the performance of team-based corporate activity.

Up, up and away

LePine began wondering why some teams outperform others when he was an Air Force officer. Part of his job involved evaluating command and control teams that examined blips on radar screens and made calls to identify aircraft, let them pass, or shoot them down. “What was striking to me was that the command and control teams were doing the same things based on the same training with roughly the same amount of experience,” he recalls. “But, there was still variability in how well they performed.”

He noticed this was especially true in training drills when teams were asked to deal with some changed condition, such as the simulated death of a teammate or the removal of a critical piece of equipment. “I kept wondering about the key factors that differentiate the effective from ineffective teams.” As it turns out, what differed were the personalities, he says.

But, until the 1990s, little attention was paid to personality in business-related research. In part, this was because a behavioral psychology movement dominated research the 1960s and 70s. LePine explains the framework for behavioral psychology this way: “Behavior depends on context. People behave the way they do because of experiences and the situations they’re in.”

LePine notes that there were many studies in psychology examining the impact of personality on behavior, but “there wasn’t consensus on the domain personality traits. There were hundreds of studies, but no common language to describe the key variables of interest.” Without a workable personality lexicon, researchers had a hard time correlating characteristics and their relationship to business outcomes.

The Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality changed all that. The model identifies how all personality characteristics can fit within five broad factors. They are: openness to new ideas or experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, which is considered the opposite of emotional stability.

“Personality describes how people tend to behave,” LePine explains. “If you’re conscientious, you tend to set goals for yourself and work hard to pursue them, and you’re dependable and orderly. If you’re agreeable, you tend to be trusting, friendly and helpful toward others. If you’re extroverted, you tend to be gregarious and assertive in social settings.”

At the same time that psychologists were honing in on the main descriptors for personality, LePine was moving from Air Force officer to Ph.D. candidate, and his interests converged with a number of developments. For one thing, research concluded that personality is a good predictor of individual workplace performance. Simultaneously, the prevalence and importance of teams in corporate life was rising, and the FFM was gelling. Reflecting the confluence of these trends and findings, LePine was among the first scholars to conduct research and publish papers linking the personality of team members to their team’s performance.

The power of a bad apple

At the time, LePine was only a year or so into his own doctorate work, but he saw other researchers examining issues related to team effectiveness and piggybacked his interest in personality onto a particular investigation. “I asked the other researchers if they would add personality and cognitive-ability scores of the study participants into the study,” he says, noting that he didn’t expect his research to get published because he wasn’t able to examine many teams, but it did. It was featured in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

This particular study was the first to consider that teammates’ personality characteristics could be considered in different ways to predict accuracy in team decision making. The study was a lab experiment simulating the same kinds of command and control activities LePine was involved with in the Air Force. He looked specifically at two traits – conscientiousness and cognitive ability, or intelligence, which is what LePine calls a person’s “mental horsepower.” According to LePine, cognitive ability indicates what you can do, whereas personality indicates what you will do.

To examine personality’s impact on teams, LePine looked at the leader’s score, as well as the lowest score among the teammates. “The results were surprising,” he says. Although the researchers expected the least conscientious member to have a significant impact on team performance, there wasn’t a significant correlation. They also thought the team leader’s conscientiousness would be a good performance predictor but, again, it wasn’t necessarily the case.

Considering the conscientiousness of the team members and leaders together told a different story, however. The least conscientious member of the teams had a major impact on team performance, but only for teams with leaders who were highly conscientious. For teams with a leader that lacked conscientiousness, having highly conscientious members couldn’t make up the difference. These findings, LePine notes, means that knowing the least conscientious person’s score can be an accurate predictor of how well the team will do, but there’s more to it. Put another way, the team is only as strong as its weakest link, provided the leader isn’t the weakest link.

Why can one bad apple spoil team performance for everyone? “Personality is important not only because it characterizes what people tend to do, but also because it impacts how other people react,” LePine says. “Your personality affects other members of the team.”

That was the conclusion of additional research work he conducted. LePine found: “When there is a team member with low conscientiousness, there are equity issues. Teammates ask, ‘Why should this person get as much credit for our success as everyone else here when he or she is not working as hard?”

How do these resentments play out in team behavior? If people think the slacker is changeable, they try to change her. If she can’t be changed, they’ll try to eject her from the team. “But, if you’re a poor performer because of low cognitive ability, people tend to think those behaviors aren’t as changeable, so they don’t get as angry,” LePine adds. “They’ll try to train or help you. They might even step in and take on some of your duties, which ends up changing your job so that it’s doable.”

Playing too nice

LePine also has examined social networks within teams. “Most of the time, we assume more teamwork is better,” he says. Effective teamwork interactions among members is satisfying and promotes cohesion, “But, when you look at individual relationships between team members, you can see patterns of teamwork that make a big difference on how teams function and perform.”

According to LePine, managers should consider that there are three fundamental types of team member relationships. The first is exclusively task-related, as in when members exchange information about their jobs and little else. Then there are exclusively expressive relationships, which might arise if two teammates don’t have a formal reason to interact, but they like each other and become friendly. When teammates are exchanging task-related work or information plus they’re friends as well, that’s a “multiplex relationship.” Those are the relationships that can really drive high performance because engender a willingness to go way above and beyond to call of duty to provide support and assistance. While multiplex relationships contribute to productivity and team performance, they also can create stress. “The downside is that there’s a maintenance side to these relationships,” LePine notes.

He likens multiplex relationships to the pressure created by workload “The challenge of workload is a good thing up to a certain point, but it can reach a level where it becomes overload, and then people become overwhelmed.” Maintaining the multiplex relationship could also increase pressure to conform.

Personality impacts multiplexity in teams because the more compatible people are, the more likely they are to develop multiplex relationships. “The cohesive team is generally a good thing … except when cohesiveness leads to group think.”

Cracking the Nut Island effect

When a group becomes overly cohesive, they begin to make decisions in the interest of maintaining the group itself, and such decisions might come at the expense of the tasks that group should be tackling, LePine says. He uses the 1976 Nut Island treatment plant spill as an example of detrimental team cohesion. Nut Island houses a sewage treatment plant in Boston Harbor and, in the early 1970s, it was run by a very cohesive team that didn’t want to bring in outside help when equipment started breaking down. The result was a massive, four-day discharge of sewage that took Massachusetts years to clean up.

“Cohesion is good, but too much of it can be bad,” LePine says. “Managing teams is all about managing dilemmas.”

Balance comes into play, too, because when people get together in groups, it amplifies whatever dominant personality characteristic exists, he continues. In another experiment using the same command and control simulation described earlier, LePine found that as the percentage of men on a team increased, the level of over-aggressiveness in the decisions increased exponentially. They were not doing it on purpose either. When these teams were given feedback on the outcomes of past decisions, they became no more aggressive than teams with all females.

Similarly, a group of extroverts become extremely extroverted, which may leave a team having a good time, but not getting much done because everyone is trying to assert dominance. A group of agreeable people become increasingly agreeable, which could leave a team floundering to make a decision and be done with it. LePine calls this the “Chip ‘n’ Dale” effect, as in the two courteous cartoon chipmunks that stand in front of an exit saying, “After you!” “No, after you!” “No, after you!” And, neither gets through the door.

Then there’s the challenge of managing the troublesome souls who never seem to recognize their own shortcomings. LePine explains: “People tend to see their own personality traits in terms that are socially desirable. A neurotic person doesn’t think he’s neurotic. He thinks he’s extra careful. A person who lacks conscientiousness doesn’t see herself as lazy, she sees herself as being laid back, unencumbered, Type B. Or a person who is disagreeable doesn’t see himself as a jerk. He sees himself as the Devil’s advocate.”

And, of course, there’s generally at least one of those types plaguing every corporate team, which is why LePine urges managers to pay closer attention to teammate personality traits. “Too often, we focus on skills and knowledge, which is important for getting the task done, but not enough emphasis is placed on personality,” he concludes. “Personality doesn’t just influence what team members do. It also influences how other team members react.”

Bottom Line:

• Personality impacts personal workplace performance, but it plays an even greater role in team performance.
• Personality traits influence how team members act, and in addition, how teammates act in response.
• Researchers have found that the personality of a single member, conscientiousness for example, can predict how well the whole team performs.
• Managing teams is all about managing dilemmas. Multiplex relationships may result from having teammates with similar or complimentary personalities, and in general mutiplexity is good. But too much multiplexity can be draining and foster over-cohesiveness.