Open AccessThe influence of demographic and cognitive diversity and personality factors on team performance
Author(s) -
Younhee Roh,
Young-Woo Sohn
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
han'gug simlihag hoeji. san'eob mich jo'jig/korean journal of industrial and organizational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2671-4345
pISSN - 1229-0696
DOI - 10.24230/kjiop.v25i4.861-887
Subject(s) - team composition , psychology , diversity (politics) , agreeableness , team effectiveness , extraversion and introversion , cognition , personality , big five personality traits , psychological safety , social psychology , knowledge management , sociology , neuroscience , anthropology , computer science
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of team composition on team performance. A total of 67 student teams participated in their team-based task for more than 10 weeks and a team is an unit of analysis. The composition variables included demographic diversity (gender and college starting year), cognitive diversity, and Big Five personality factors. To test the hypothesis that there will be significant differences in team performance between three groups (low-, medium-, and high-diversity) varying with demographic (gender and college starting year) and cognitive diversity, one-way ANOVAs and post-hoc analyses were used. Findings regarding gender diversity revealed that team performance was greater for medium- and low-diversity groups than for high-diversity group. While findings regarding college starting year revealed that team performance was greater for low- and high-diversity groups than for medium-diversity group, findings regarding cognitive diversity measured by diversity of attending colleges revealed that team performance was greater for medium-diversity group than for high-diversity group. These findings suggest that there will be an optimal level of diversity for enhancing team performance. Then we examined the relationships between Big Five personality factors as team composition variables and team outcomes. Team extroversion showed positive relationships with the creative part and team presentation. However, the minimum of team agreeableness showed negative relationships with the logical part of team performance, which was the opposite of our hypothesis. We discussed that the personality factors for team composition could vary with task characteristics.