The Personality Composition of Teams and Creativity: The Moderating Role of Team Creative Confidence

Abstract

We examined the possibility that teams composed primarily of individuals with personality characteristics conducive to team creativity (e.g., high extraversion, high openness to experience, low conscientiousness, high neuroticism, low agreeableness) would show synergistic increases in creativity when they experienced high levels of "team creative confidence", a shared understanding that the team is more creative than each team member individually. We tested these hypotheses using a sample of 145 three-student teams that worked on a set of idea generation tasks at Time 1 (T1) and a second set two weeks later at Time 2 (T2). As expected, results of cross-lagged regression analysis indicated that when team creative confidence at T1 was high, team creativity at T2 increased quadratically as the number of team members who scored high on extraversion, high on openness, or low on conscientiousness increased. However, the number of individuals composing a team who scored high on neuroticism or low on agreeableness had no relation to team creativity under conditions of high or low team creative confidence. Implications of these results for the design of creative teams are discussed.

Developing a Social Enterprise Performance Scale and Examining the Relationship Between Entrepreneurs’ Personality Traits and Their Perceived Enterprise Performance

“…People possessing openness have difficulty focusing on tasks that require intense concentration or patience (Rose et al, 1994), which explains why this trait negatively influences the service programmes dimension, as most social problems cannot be resolved overnight. People exhibiting high levels of neuroticism tend to provide others with candid feedback regarding their actions, which can stimulate additional ideas or increase team performance (Baer et al, 2008). This trait thus has a positive impact on personal issues and service programmes.…”

“…People having high openness scores have more varied perspectives and an enhanced ability to absorb and combine new information. They typically seek new experiences as well as explore novel ideas and should, therefore, be effective at the cognitive exploration and cross-fertilisation of ideas (Baer, Oldham, Jacobsohn & Hollingshad, 2008). However, research has shown that strong openness can render people unable to focus on tasks that require intense concentration because of their intellectual curiosity, which is easily piqued by novelty (Rose, Fogg, Helmreich & McFadden, 1994).…”

“…People exhibiting high levels of neuroticism are prone to irrational thought, impulsive behaviour, and applying poor coping strategies in stressful situations (Rothmann & Coetzer, 2003). However, people with high levels of neuroticism are likely to provide others with candid feedback regarding their ideas, which can stimulate additional ideas or cause members to elaborate on their ideas, increasing a team's creativity (Baer et al, 2008). By contrast, people with low neuroticism scores are typically self-confident, calm, relaxed, and able to face stressful situations without becoming upset (Zhao & Seibert, 2006).…”

Conceptualizing and Measuring Group Openness and Cohesion as Dimensions of Group Personality

“…Most of the studies that used the indirect approach employ it using the FiveFactor Model of personality (McCrae & Costa Jr., 1999) or selected sub-facets of it assessed at the individual level (Bear, Oldham, Jacobsohn, & Hollingshead, 2008;Homan et al, 2008).…”

“…As an example, studies trying to predict group performance from group personality composition have found that the personality dimensions of the Five-Factor Model (neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness conscientiousness, and openness to experience) greatly differ in their predictive power depending how they were calculated at the group level, which types of groups were assessed and how group performance was operationalized (for an overview, see : Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998;van Vianen & De Dreu, 2001). However, in many studies, openness to experience emerged as a dimension with high predictive power for different group-level outcomes, such as group performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991;Homan et al, 2008), group creativity (Bear et al, 2008) or within-group information exchange (Bond & Shiu, 1997). Overall, openness to experience at the individual level seems to be the only personality dimension that can relatively consistently predict a wider range of group-level outcomes.…”