Work teams: selecting members for optimal performance

Canadian Psychology, Feb-May 1998 by Kichuk, Susan, Wiesner, Willi H

Abstract

Teams are a growing phenomenon in the Canadian workplace as organizations face constant pressure to flatten the traditional hierarchy and maintain a structure that allows constant adaptation to the changing business environment. When teams are successful they have the potential of providing many benefits such as increased flexibility and creativity. However, when teams fail, they waste considerable resources. Therefore, organizations need to be concerned with maximizing the probability of team success. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to focus on team membership. Personality, which has been shown to contribute to the prediction of individual performance may also have a role in predicting team performance. The purpose of this paper is to establish what we currently know about personality as an individual and team selection measure, to establish a systematic research plan for team selection using personality, and to suggest the implications of what we do know about personality as a team selection measure.

Organizations today face constant pressures to flatten the traditional hierarchy and maintain a structure that allows continual adaptation to the changing business environment. One way in which they have responded to these pressures is to increasingly make use of work teams. In fact, teams are replacing individuals as the basic building block of organizations (Booth, 1994; McShane, 1992). A Conference Board of Canada survey reveals that 42% of Canadian organizations report widespread use of team-based activity with an almost equal number of respondents indicating moderate use of team activity (Booth, 1994). Companies such as Dofasco, Xerox, Toyota, and Westinghouse Canada are spearheading the movement to team-based work. Although the use of teams is widespread, the type of team employed and the degree of success that organizations have had with their team initiatives varies.

Teams have the potential of being particularly valuable to an organization when they are used in situations that require individuals with different skills or perspectives to work together towards a common goal. A team's probability of success is contingent upon having members who are each capable of contributing to the task at hand, and who work well together. Therefore, one of the first logical steps in the implementation of successful teams is to select the optimal combination of people. Recent evidence in the individual selection literature relating certain personality variables to individual job performance, along with the requirement that the team members must be able to work well together, suggests that team member personality might be useful in selecting for team membership.

The Potential for Personality as a Team Selection Measure

Personality has a three-fold role in team selection. First, as in individual selection, personality has the potential to add incremental validity to other measures such as ability in the prediction of job (task) performance for each individual on the team. Second, personality might be helpful in identifying those people who are capable of working on a team. Third, personality may have a role in identifying the optimal combination of people to ensure a good working relationship among team members. Once these three roles for personality have been explored, it should be possible generate personality profiles for team members. Profiles could be coded for computer so that managers could identify the employees with the appropriate skills for the task and run a program to find the optimal combination of team members based on personality. However, before such procedures can be implemented, researchers must provide the necessary decision rules. The purpose of this paper is to begin the journey towards this goal by establishing what we currently know about personality as an individual and team selection measure, to establish a systematic research plan for team selection using personality, and to suggest the implications of what we do know about personality as a team selection measure.

The Research Evidence

Personality As A Selection Measure

Personality traits are relatively enduring characteristics of individuals which are not easily changed by interventions such as behavioural training (Helmreich, 1984). The potential of personality as a selection measure has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity with the advent of high quality tests designed to measure personality in the normal population, and by the emergence of a widely accepted personality classification referred to as the "Big Five" (Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience). The standardized "Big Five" terminology has allowed researchers to re-evaluate and compile previous research studies that relate personality to individual performance with techniques such as meta-analysis. The results from two recent meta-analyses suggest that personality is a potentially valuable tool for the prediction of future job performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991).