Team Building and Project Teams

Practical applications of personality typing

About the author of 3DPersonality.com

One of the trends in the U.S. workforce over the last 20 years has been the increasing use of teams to organize work and manage projects. Teams require the coming together of co-workers of roughly equal status who must cooperate in order to reach common goals. Employers sometimes sponsor corporate team-building events to encourage leadership and cooperation. Researchers have discovered that workers' skills in interpersonal relationships can influence the effectiveness and productivity of the teams they form.

How Personality Affects Team Building and Project Teams

Psychologists have developed a way to help managers and their teams improve their people skills. One approach is to use a specific test to measure how workers relate to others. It is called the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation – Behavior (FIRO-B) Awareness Scale. It helps a person assess his or her relation to others at work. The test examines three separate areas of needs:

1. Inclusion, your preference for interaction with others.
2. Control, your need for power or influence.
3. Affection, your desire for closeness or companionship with others.

Within each of these three categories are two more subcategories, dealing with whether or not the need is Expressed – the person conveys that need to others; or Wanted – the person would like to have that behavior communicated to them. Personality types can be identified by the FIRO-B test along continuity scales for each of the six dimensions: Inclusion-Expressed, Inclusion-Wanted, Control-Expressed, Control-Wanted, Affection-Expressed, and Affection-Wanted.

When building teams, the team leaders can consider what FIRO-B types might best fit the different slots. Those with low Inclusion-Wanted would be individualists or introverts and could work without supervision. Those with high Affection-Wanted tend to be good listeners. Those that combine high Control-Expressed with Affection-Wanted are good taskmasters. As a leader assembles a team, he or she wants to be sure not to create a team all of one personality type. By building a diverse team, one can combine the strengths of all the personality types.

T.E.A.M. Personality Types

Authors Scott West and Mitch Anthony recognize the relationship between team building and the understanding of personality styles. They recommend that employees use personality testing to find out what personality styles best describe themselves and to start noticing the styles of others around them. Then West and Anthony encourage workers to think about how they could make adjustments to communicate better with the personality types that they tend to have the most difficulty meeting halfway.

The workshops West and Anthony developed establish four different personality types defined by T.E.A.M.

T - The Togetherness Person
E - The Enterpriser
A - The Analyzer
M - The Motivator

West and Anthony were concerned with building financial services teams. They pointed out that each team should have at least one of each personality type included in the mix. The Motivator would hold the seminars, make the presentations, and be the charismatic charmer. The Togetherness Person would be the ace at providing customer service. He or she would be happy to solve the unexpected problems and ensure all the clients would have what they needed. The Analyzer would prepare the briefing material. The details of the slides, the notebooks, and the individual special profiles would be handled by the Analyzer's well-organized, methodical systems. Setting up the contract and closing the sale – that would be left to the Enterpriser.

References

More real world examples of personality typing:
     Employee Performance Management
     Customer Relations
     Professional Career Choices

About the primary author of 3DPersonality.com: Dr. R. Jean Maddigan is a professional social scientist who has been interested in personality systems for over a decade. Read more on her background.