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The Role of Team Personality in Team Effectiveness and Performance

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Strategies for Team Science Success

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.

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Change history

  • 03 March 2020

    The published version of the book has missed to include the corresponding authors’ e-mail address for chapters 14, 35 and 44. Affiliation correction provided for the author Dr. Milton Eder in chapter 9 has been missed to update in the list of contributors. The affiliation detail for the author Dr. Stephen M were published incorrectly in chapter 33. Also, the text in the Abstract section which reads “(cite other chapters in team science book).” was not removed during the copy editing stage. These errors have been corrected, and the text has been updated in the book.

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Acknowledgments

This project has been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. HHSN261200800001E. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

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Correspondence to Brooke A. Stipelman .

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Stipelman, B.A., Rice, E.L., Vogel, A.L., Hall, K.L. (2019). The Role of Team Personality in Team Effectiveness and Performance. In: Hall, K., Vogel, A., Croyle, R. (eds) Strategies for Team Science Success. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20992-6_14

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