Agreeableness and Teamwork: How traits influence team performance

One of the nasty little tid bits to team performance that business executives, coaches, and team leads struggle with is deciphering the right types of personalities that are most likely to help in creating strong teams. If you are like most people in a position to hire others, you want to find hard charging people who seek to focus on the tasks at hand. What you don't want is them to be so self oriented that they create dysfunction and conflict. 

Teamwork is a process of recruiting the right mix of people through their skills and personality to build a strong performing team. Agreeableness seems to be one of the traits you can look for in a potential candidate.

Let me give you an example. Agreeableness was found to have significant impact on about 93% of other traits. It was a bridge between multiple traits and in many ways seemed to influence them as a general outlook. You can read about that that study in 'Agreeableness a helpful trait for general success in life, study finds'

Whether you are recruiting for a team sport or you are creating your next business team  you will want to ensure that you look for people with a level of agreeableness. 

While such traits don't guarantee success they do foster the right team characteristics. Having both star performances mixed with the right team players can make a difference in overall outcomes as they are the supporters of the group. 

Long term success is in the development of the right team with the right personalities. A single player may be able to hit the ball or create a new venture from time to time but it is the total team that can produce results over and over in a way that leads to long term success. 

The next time you do some recruiting think about the softer side of people with a level of agreeableness as an untapped source of team formation.

Michael P. Wilmot, Deniz S. Ones. Agreeableness and Its Consequences: A Quantitative Review of Meta-Analytic Findings. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2022; 108886832110730 DOI: 10.1177/10888683211073007