Selecting Individuals in Team Settings: The Importance of Social Skills, Personality Characteristics, and Teamwork Knowledge

Abstract

Although work is commonly organized around teams, there is relatively little empirical research on how to select individuals in team-based settings. The goal of this investigation was to examine whether 3 of the most commonly used selection techniques for hiring into traditional settings (a structured interview, a personality test, and a situational judgment test) would be effective for hiring into team settings. In a manufacturing organization with highly interdependent teams, we examined the relationships between social skills, several personality characteristics (Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability), teamwork knowledge, and contextual performance. Results indicate that each of these constructs is bivariately related to contextual performance in a team setting, with social skills, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and teamwork knowledge incrementally predicting contextual performance (with a multiple correlation of .48). Implications of these results for selection in team and traditional settings are discussed.Designing work around autonomous or semi autonomous teams has become a fact of organizational life (Cascio, 1995;Hackman, 1990;Manz & Sims, 1993). But this movement toward team-based designs has not been accompanied by research on the types of human resource systems that will support the use of teams. This is particularly true for selection systems. It is not clear if the vast amount of research on individual personnel selection will transfer to situations where individuals are expected to We thank John Hollenbeck and Neal Schmitt for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Their input resulted in many meaningful improvements.

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