Report Understanding Your Personality and Teamwork Experiences
Report Prepared For:
Tharakanath Va October 22, 2024 Individual and Team Performance Lab Department of Psychology The University of Calgary OVERVIEW
PERSONALITY
This personality report provides your scores on the “Big Five” factors of personality (i.e., traits) based on your survey responses. The goal is to help you become better acquainted with yourself and your team members.
Big Five involve Extraversion, Emotionality, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness (exact labels vary by theorist). These traits are made up of “facets,” which are narrow personality variables that are nested beneath each Big Five trait. This report provides scores on the narrow personality variables as well as the overall Big Five score. The Big Five can describe people according to the following:
Extraversion: talkative, assertive, energetic, outgoing, outspoken, and sociable
Emotionality: emotionally-stable, comfortable, and calm Conscientiousness: organized, thoughtful, planful, efficient, responsible, and dependable Agreeableness: sympathetic, kind, appreciative, trusting, soft- hearted, warm, and sensitive Openness: imaginative, intelligent, original, insightful, and curious
Over the past half century personality psychologists converged on these five personality factors, or traits, as a common framework for describing human personality traits. Other taxonomies exist that also have a lot of scientific support, but the Big Five is clearly one of the dominant frameworks.
Moreover, the Big Five have been shown to be important in predicting a wide variety of work outcomes. Job performance, leadership, productivity, sales, training, satisfaction, engagement, commitment, well-being, and so on are all robustly related to Big Five traits. ITP Metrics uses the Big Five because they are scientifically proven factors of personality, and because they are consistently related to important workplace criteria (with 100s of thousands of people participating in those peer- reviewed, published studies).
The Big Five are also important to team effectiveness. First, the Big Five are related to how people perform in teams (e.g., contributing to the team’s work; keeping the team on track). Second, the Big Five are related to aggregate team functioning based on the overall levels of the trait in the team, defined in various ways (e.g., average, variability, configuration).
The Big Five scores are provided along with scores on the six facets that make up each Big Five personality trait. Text describing the implications of these score levels for your behavior in teams appears next to the facet labels.
Your scores are presented in percentile form. A percentile is used so that you can interpret your score relative to a large “normative sample” of other people who have responded to the survey. A percentile indicates the percentage of scores in the sample that fall below your own score. For example, if you score at the 90th percentile, your score was higher than 90 percent of the normative sample. The normative sample is based on over 20,000 respondents from all walks of life.
The charts containing your scores have vertical grey lines indicating the deciles separating every 10 percentile points. The charts also have vertical yellow lines containing the breakpoints between “Low” to “Moderate” score levels (25th percentile) and “Moderate” to “High” score levels (75th percentile). Your report provides customized written feedback based on your score level.
APPLICATION
Look for overall patterns and themes in your results. Remember that higher or lower scores are not “better” or “worse” in terms of performance. Rather, your scores reflect your unique personality with respect to the Big Five model. In some instances scoring higher on a trait can be helpful (e.g., sociability may be positively related to sales performance). In other instances, scoring higher on the same trait can be a challenge (e.g., sociability may be negative related to satisfaction during remote work). Accordingly, look for aspects of your report that confirm your expectations, aspects that surprised you, and identify 2-3 traits that you consider strengths and 2-3 strengths that represent development opportunities (where you may need the support of your team). Use the report to help identify some key insights that will help your team members better understand who you are as a person and how you can best work together. More development suggestions appear later in the report.
Activity Level: You likely find yourself alternating between managing multiple activities at once and finding time to take it easy and relax. Continue to avoid the stress of always being on the go while considering ways you can best utilize your energy to contribute to the team tasks.
Assertiveness: You sometimes like to take the lead in a group setting, but are also comfortable allowing others to take charge in a team. Be aware of times when you should speak your mind or take the lead but also be mindful of situations where you should take a step back and let others contribute.
Cheerfulness: You tend to be joyful and optimistic, but also know when to be serious about accomplishing the team's work. Continue to adapt your behavior to best suit the situation, whether that means sharing a laugh with friends or focusing on the task.
Excitement-Seeking: You enjoy your fair share of excitement but within reason. Take advantage of your flexibility to help your team succeed at every stage of your project, from the routine, low-risk work to the more exciting, conceptual stages of teamwork and direction setting.
Friendliness: You are fairly comfortable meeting most new people but there are times you may prefer to focus on the task rather than building friendships. Be mindful of the times you can enjoy your ability to connect with others and when you should focus on the team task at hand.
Gregariousness: You can work alone or in a group, and can likely to succeed in either situation. Remember that others may not be as flexible, be prepared to help your teammates adapt to environments that are less preferable to them.
Anxiety: You may experience some worries or stress when thinking about your tasks or a team project, but you tend not to let yourself be overwhelmed by these thoughts. Capitalize on your ability to anticipate challenges without getting caught up in problems that may never happen.
Frustration: Sometimes you may find yourself frustrated by a project or annoyed with a team member, but you likely do not let your temper get the best of you. Continue to stay calm and focus on showing your engagement in the team project by engaging in task-focused discussion.
Immoderation: You tend to be able to stay on task, but also are ready to join in spontaneous team discussion to help generate ideas and solutions. Capitalize on your ability to stay focused to help the team succeed, but do not be afraid to join in on spontaneous or tangent conversations that can lead to innovation.
Melancholic: You tend to feel happy and content with yourself and abilities, but sometimes may be critical of yourself. Turn your self-criticism into constructive areas for of self-improvement and reflect on recent accomplishments and past achievements to maintain your self-confidence.
Self-Consciousness: Although you often feel confident interacting with your team, you may sometimes feel uncomfortable sharing your ideas. Remember that constructive comments about your idea are not a personal attack. If you are self-conscious about speaking up, consider what the team might miss by not sharing your perspective.
Vulnerability: You may find yourself overwhelmed or struggling to manage the multiple tasks and priorities required with group work. Help your team to clarify individual roles so that you can depend on others to complete their tasks and avoid becoming stressed or overwhelmed by the entire project.
Achievement-Striving: You restrict your time and effort into tasks and may accept a passable standard of work. This may help your team avoid doing unnecessary work that does little to contribute to the overall objective. However, you risk producing sub-par work and not meeting the expectations of your team.
Cautiousness: You are reasonably cautious and consider both sides of a decision before taking action. Help your team take calculated risks while also ensuring adequate time is given to discuss decisions where the risks could outweigh the benefits.
Dependability: For the most part, others can depend on you to follow through on your obligations. When something gets in the way of you completing your task or responsibility, try to give your team members notice so you do not let the team down.
Orderliness: You tend to work in a fairly tidy space but you are not distracted or bothered if a mess starts to build up. Be open to team members who may prefer a different style of work, whether that is clean and tidy or in disarray and chaos.
Self-Efficacy: You may find yourself doubting your ability to get the job done. You should inform your team members of your strengths when the group is assigning tasks in order to exploit your skillset, but be willing to push yourself to learn and try new things to build on your current knowledge.
Self-Discipline: You often have little trouble carrying out your plans but may sometimes waste time procrastinating. To ensure you execute your tasks without wasting time, make a task list for each working hour of the day and stick to it.
Altruism: You seem to find a balance between attending to your own needs and emotions, and considering the opinions and feelings of others. Maintain your ability to stay focused on your own responsibilities while being mindful and prepared to step in to assist other team members if needed.
Cooperation: You do not actively seek out confrontation but you also do not shy away from it. Promote harmony and healthy debate in your team by encouraging less cooperative individuals to stay on task with their arguments and highly cooperative individuals to stand up for their opinions or constructively analyze others ideas.
Modesty: You have a healthy amount of self-respect and are reasonably proud of your accomplishments. Use your confidence to help encourage individuals in your team who may not think highly about their value to the team.
Morality: You tend to be genuine and follow the rules most of the time. When working in a team, remember that you are working towards a shared goal and try not to take advantage of others, as it will negatively affect everyone in the team.
Sympathy: You can sympathize with many people but not all. Working in a team, you will come across unique backgrounds and situations so be mindful of other members' situations or circumstances that you might not normally be sympathetic to.
Trust: You tend to trust others but still view their intentions to follow through on commitments with some suspicion. This caution can be important when you first form a team but trust that your team members will do their work by setting clear expectations of work quality in order to maintain team trust and accountability.
Adventurousness: While you enjoy some routine, you are not opposed to change and variety. During time restricted tasks, depend on conventional methods but be open to exploring alternative thinking and methods when time and resources allow your team to do so.
Artistic Interests: You may prefer to engage in more concrete tasks and do not see much value in art or aesthetic work. Use this to help the team focus on executing tasks that are more technical, but try not to discount the value of presentation and imaginative aspects of a task that may impress stakeholders.
Imagination: You tend to think in concrete or tangible terms, which means you don't easily get lost in thought. Capitalize on this ability to concentrate on your work, encouraging other team members to do the same, but take mental breaks that include non-structured thinking to help generate new ideas and solve challenging problems.
Intellect: You may find yourself uninterested in abstract concepts or theories. This can help you to focus on the basic aspects of a task required for your team to achieve its objectives. Be willing to discuss challenging ideas to identify potential problems with the course of action, as well as grow as an individual.
Liberalism: You tend to be open to liberal ideologies, but do see the value in tradition and established ways of thinking. Use this flexibility to connect to different-minded individuals and help others to be open to contrasting perspectives.
Sentimentality: You tend to be aware of your emotions and the emotions of others. Use this ability to try to recognize situations where it is important to connect and empathize with others or where it is key to help the team focus on the tasks at hand.
1 Do you feel that this report accurately reflects your personality? What do you find most / least accurate?
2 What traits stand out as being helpful for working with others and why?
3 What traits stand out as preventing you from working well with others and why?
4 What traits do you think could benefit you working alone but could harm you working in a team? With this knowledge, how could you adjust when working in a team?
Team Discussion 1. Discuss an instance when, working in a team, one of your personality traits was helpful.
2. Discuss an instance when, working in a team, one of your personality traits was unhelpful.
3. Based on your report, share three traits you think could help your team achieve high performance. Why?
4. Based on your report, share three traits you think could prevent your team from achieving high perfo- mance. Why?
The survey items were drawn from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP.ori.org). According to the IPIP.ori.org project website, funds for the IPIP project were provided by a research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, U. S. Public Health Service (Grant MH49227: Mapping personality trait structure; Lewis R. Goldberg, Principal Investigator; Gerard Saucier, Co-investigator). Further details about research involving the specific items used in the ITPmetrics.com survey can be found on the research page of ITPmetrics.com and from Dr. Thomas O'Neill (toneill@ucalgary.ca). Please also see:
Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. G. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public- domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84-96.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
