The effect of personality type on team performance

Team approach to IS development The development of innovative solutions to complex problems has become increasingly challenging. The modern information systems (IS) development model includes the use of cross-functional teams, which comprise both users, such as accountants and salespeople, and IS professionals such as systems analysts and programmers. Team members must work together effectively to produce successful systems. In the past, IS departments perceived themselves as autonomous units that provided specific expertise to user departments. With the team approach, IS professionals are no longer autonomous but are equal members of a group of professionals, each with a specific contribution to make. Their responsibility is no longer independently to design an IS, but instead to carefully direct the users to design their own systems. Expected benefits of successful teams include increased motivation, greater task commitment, higher levels of performance, ability to withstand stress, more innovative solutions[1], and decreased development time[2]. Research is currently underway to find appropriate measures for these factors so team effectiveness can be accurately evaluated[3]. One example of the use of teams in the IS development process is the steering committee, a team composed of the heads of major departments in the organization. In one study, 71 per cent of the respondents reported using a steering committee to determine which new systems would be developed. Almost 83 per cent of these were either satisfied (66.8 per cent) or very satisfied (16 per cent) with the steering committee's performance[4]. While these results suggest the popularity of the team approach to IS planning, the finding that only 16 per cent were very satisfied with the performance is not an overwhelmingly positive evaluation of their effectiveness. If the team approach is truly preferred, as the team-building literature proposes, then one would expect a higher level of satisfaction with team performance. Ineffective teams may be the product of inappropriate team composition. Deciding to use a team approach is only the first step. Great care must be exercised in building the team to ensure its ultimate effectiveness. There are a number of pitfalls involving group dynamics that can undermine a team's effectiveness[5]. This paper proposes a model of the impact of the personality-type composition of a team on overall team performance. The model applies personality-type theory to the team-building process and then illustrates the importance of this theory by evaluating a case example of two software development teams. One of the teams was …