Influence of Personality on Teamwork Behaviour and Communication

Ŕ periodica polytechnica Influence of personality on Teamwork Social and Management Sciences behaviour and communication 18/2 (2010) 63–77 doi: 10.3311/pp.so.2010-2.02 Márta Juhász web: http://www.pp.bme.hu/so c Periodica Polytechnica 2010 RESEARCH ARTICLE Received 2010-11-08 Abstract 1 Teamwork in high risk environment Job characteristics of the operator teams of the Nuclear Numerous organisations tend to require effective professional Power Plant are complex and highly controlled in which there teamwork in a high risk environment because expert teams have are considerable demands and pressures to behaviour confor- deep professional knowledge and are supposed to have fewer mity and a person is restricted in the range of own behaviour. personal problems and conflicts between the members. Team Thus, individual differences in personality characteristics are members studied a lot in order to belong to a certain team, so more likely to influence the specific behaviour a person adopts. everybody in the team is considered to be an expert in their own This type of environment determines and regulates the commu- professional fields. They cooperate in order to achieve a given nication flow among team members that consist of quantity and task following and complying with the rules. High risk environ- quality information exchanges. All these circumstances lead ments mean that certain failures of teamwork in complex organi- our focus on analysing the relationship between the employees’ zations can lead to dramatic effects. That is why working in this communication and observable behaviour and their personality type of team can be inherently stressful for the members. The traits. major parts of air crashes involve human errors, especially fail- We video registered 17 operator teams (N=90) in a Simula- ures in teamwork. Unfortunately, professional training in gen- tor Centre of a Hungarian Nuclear Power Plant and analysed eral mainly focuses on technical, not interpersonal skills. These the correlation between the team input (operator personnel’s findings support the argument that technical skills are necessary personality traits) and team process (communication hidden but not sufficient to ensure high level of safety over time. In patterns, traceable teamwork-oriented social skills and task- professional teams the personnel is strongly motivated to per- oriented professional skills), and ultimately team output (team form successfully and to maintain high standards of safety, so it performance evaluated by instructors). can be assumed that they are all aware of the basic standards of This study reveals some relationships between personality professional proficiency. Operators, pilots and physicians have traits and team-oriented communication utterances. Extrover- strong professional cultures with as many positive as negative sion and Openness to experience personality factors show pos- aspects: strong motivation to do well their tasks, strong pride itive correlation with Politeness and Relation communication in their profession, sense of personal invulnerability, maintain- indicators, but contrary to our expectation the Agreeableness ing high individual standards, continual performance evaluation, personality factor negatively relates with these indicators. The pushing the limits of performance – “press-on”, invulnerability Team-performance has several relationships with personality to fatigue and other frailties, capability for individual vs. team traits. First of all Professional knowledge and Coordination be- performance. The majority of expert team members in all cul- haviour markers show correlations with Neuroticism and Con- tures agree that: a) their decision-making is as good in emergen- scientiousness personality factors. Team-performance as an cies as in normal situations, b) their performance is not affected output of the team process is directly influenced by the Consci- by personal problems, c) they do not make more errors under entiousness and the Extraversion personality factors. high stress, and d) true professionals leave behind the personal problems. Keywords personality Five Factor Model team performance commu- · · · 2 Communication utterances in the teamwork nication utterances behaviour markers · Understanding the past and predicting the future behaviour of others requires the ability to imagine how other persons Márta Juhász perceive, think, and act. Working together in a team is fa- Department of Ergonomics and Psychology, BME, 1111 Budapest, Egry J. u. 1., Hungary cilitated only if each member of the team has a theory of e-mail: [email protected] Influence of personality 2010 18 2 63 the other members’ mind, ability, concepts and intents. The guistic Factors Project [35], [23] investigates the fine struc- main channel to exchange the information is the communica- ture of verbal communication of cockpit crews. In this project tion. The prime task of communication is to facilitate the es- properties of verbal communication are identified that correlate tablishment, maintenance and modification of shared assump- with the task load and performance of crews that are faced with tions about each other’s minds. The maintenance of commu- complex and potentially dangerous tasks. In their analysis it is nication means adding information, modifying it in a way that pointed out that members of well-performing crews more often is obvious to all members of the team. If such modifications refer to their crew by pronouns like we, and that communication are accepted, the modification becomes part of a team’s com- density increases with high work load. mon ground, and the team members will act accordingly. In Speech Act Theory, as initiated by John Austin and John this way, the formed common ground constitutes the basis of Searle [33] started observing socially relevant acts of the speaker a shared mental model that gives coherence to the action of a like commands, permissions, promises, apologies, insults, or team. The common ground includes information. The under- even more specific ones like hiring a person or declaring an standing of this information in communication is usually indi- emergency. Speech acts can be part of a more complex com- cated by acknowledgements like ok, mm-hmm, and gestures like municative interaction, directly relating to preceding or subse- nodding. This kind of communication utterances may be fac- quent speech acts, as with questions that request an answer or ac- tual claims, questions, commands, common goals, objectives. knowledgements that express understanding of agreement with a The most important device by which common grounds can be previous utterance. Traditionally, the speech act theory is char- maintained and changed is the language. From this perspective acterized by a more deductive, rather than empirical, research it is necessary to understand numerous important properties of methodology. But there are a number empirical studies, e.g., language. One theoretical model for that is ‘dynamic interpre- class room communication analysis [11], or the analysis of mit- tation’, which understands the meaning of utterances as their igation and reinforcement, that show that the speech act theory propensity to change common grounds [19, 20, 23]. can be fruitfully applied in the analysis of real communication The NASA researchers analyzed the causes of airport acci- events. dents and incidents between 1968 and 1976, and concluded that 13 distinct types have been developed by means of cockpit pilot error was more likely correlated to failures in team com- speech analysing, in particular status reports, which report on munication and coordination than deficiencies in technical pro- the current state of equipment, weather, location; reports of ac- ficiency [10]. tion, in which the speaker gives a report of his own actions; reports of reports, which rephrase information expressed before; “While language is not only used for communication (think prognoses about the likely future course of events; diagnoses, of thinking out aloud, as in organizing one’s thoughts), which are concerned with the likely cause of past events; com- communication is one of the prime uses of language. And mands and permissions, by which one crew member can directly while communication is possible without the use of lan- influence the actions of others; complies, which verbalize ac- guage (think of gestures, signs, pictures, alarm sounds), tions that are performed to carry out a command; reports of in- communication is certainly facilitated by language. Com- tention, which express the intention to act in a certain way; ex- munication in turn is essential for the coordination of joint pressive, which express an emotion; and three types of acknowl- actions in groups or teams.” (in: Krifka, 2004. [20] 1.pp) edging speech acts: simple acknowledgments, affirmations and Heimlich “Good communication” is one of the main aspects rephrases. of the team work especially under high risk environment be- Conversation Analysis, as initiated by Harvey Sacks [31], [16] cause the communication is an important part of the interac- has developed ways of transcribing conversation in minute de- tion. Good communication is crucial for excellent crews, and tails and of analyzing it in objective ways without paying at- communication errors reflect deficiencies of cooperation in gen- tention to the participants’ intentions. Phenomena like the in- eral. In order to share the information and form a shared men- troduction, continuation and uptake of topics of conversation, tal model or

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