Personality in Teamwork: An Empirical Evaluation of “Big Five” Factors versus Facets

1. Personality in Teamwork: An Empirical Evaluation of “Big Five” Factors versus Facets Thomas O’Neill Natalie Allen Joy Klammer Sarah Ross Erica Lundberg The TeamWork Lab Department of Psychology ABSTRACT Meta-analytic research has demonstrated that personality traits consistently account for variance in job performance (e.g., Hurtz & Donovan, 2000; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). Research on personality in teamwork, however, has not yet provided robust results (Kroeck & Brown, 2004) despite explicit attempts to replicate seminal findings (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998; van Vianen & De Dreu, 2001). One characteristic of this latter research is an exclusive reliance on the “Big Five” factors of personality. This is lamentable because several researchers have demonstrated that “facet-level” traits are better predictors of various work and non-work related behaviours (e.g., Dudley, Orvis, Lebiecki, & Cortina, 2006; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001). Accordingly, we collected personality and team perceptions data from 271 engineering students (66 groups) who participated in two 120-minute teambuilding sessions. Results indicated that Big Five personality traits obscured the relation between personality and perceptions of teamwork. Specifically, we found that the Big Five facets, but not the corresponding Big Five factor, were related to several teamwork perceptions. Thus, limiting interpretations to the broadly defined Big Five factors may hinder advancements in delineating the role of personality in teamwork. RESULTS • METHOD • Participants • Data were collected from 271 students enrolled in seven sections of Engineering Science (ES 050). This is an entry-level engineering course that all students must complete in order to advance in the program. Sixty-six teams were composed of either 4 (n = 43), or 5 (n = 23) group members. Actual sample sizes varied depending on the analysis due to some teams having low rwg values. • Procedure • Data collection occurred during two 2-hour teambuilding sessions conducted by the researchers. The first teambuilding session involved completing a personality and demographics questionnaire, forming teams (randomly), and participating in a group activity that was designed to help team members familiarize themselves with one another (i.e., the Desert Survival Exercise; Johnson & Johnson, 1994). • The second teambuilding session began with an overview of brainstorming techniques and a description of how these techniques relate to different phases of the engineering design cycle (see Dunwoody, Cramond, Nesbit, Paterson, & Teslenko, 2006). Subsequently, the teams were engaged in a bridge building exercise that culminated in a test of the bridges’ capacity to support weight. Finally, a questionnaire assessing team members’ perceptions of the team’s processes was administered. • Measures • Personality: Assessed using Goldberg’s (1999) IPIP measure of the Big Five. Mean factor and facet reliabilities were .84 and .69, respectively. • Criteria: Dependent variables were: • * shared identification (Mael & Ashforth, 1992) • * cohesion (Waldman et al., 2004) • * potency (Guzzo et al., 1993) • * team goal commitment (Klein et al., 2001) • * team commitment (Bishop & Scott, 2000) • * group task satisfaction (Mason & Griffin, 2005) • Four teams were removed due to missing data, and depending on rwg values, between 1 and 3 additional teams were removed from a given analysis. The mean reliability across criteria was .78. Across teams and variables, the mean rwg was .93, mean ICC(1) was .16, and mean ICC(2) was . 43. CONSCIENTIOUSNESS EXTRAVERSION • STUDY PURPOSE • The Big Five factors of personality are often conceptualized in a hierarchical fashion (Digman, 1990). For example, one measure from Goldberg’s (1999) International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) conceptualizes extraversion at the factor and facet level. See the Figure below. AGREEABLENESS Extraversion CONCLUSION The results of this exploratory study suggest three conclusions: (1) Within a given Big Five factor, there tends to be non-trivial variation in facet-criterion correlations; (2) This variability may yield insights into the relation between personality and team effectiveness that cannot be obtained from relying solely on the Big Five model; (3) The narrowly-defined facets of personality are more readily interpretable than are Big Five factors, meaning theoretical linkages between personality and criteria are clearer at the facet level. Future team-level research may indeed benefit from attending to facets, in addition to factors, to determine the effect of group personality on team processes and outcomes. Activity Level Excitement Seeking Friendliness Cheerfulness Gregariousness Assertiveness The aim of this exploratory study was to document the empirical differences between personality factor- and facet-level criterion correlations at the team level.