Performance and Conscientiousness in Teams: A Field Experiment

This study investigated whether conscientiousness, one of the five personality traits, affects team performance. Although previous studies have shown that conscientiousness is the most potent noncognitive construct for individual occupational performance, experimental evidence of the impact of conscientiousness on group performance is scarce. Results in the present study derived from a field experiment, with 120 students paired according to their level (high vs. low) of previously measured conscientiousness score. Three types of dyads were obtained: low-conscientiousness, highconscientiousness, and heterogeneous. The low (high)-conscientiousness dyads consisted of two members, both with low (or high) scores on the conscientiousness trait. Heterogeneous dyads consisted of two members, of which one had high scores on the conscientiousness trait, and one had low scores. All teams then worked on case studies provided by the "Samsung Innovation Camp" project. The goal of each group was to propose a genuinely practical solution. Team performance was measured on several criteria by an external board. The results showed that high-conscientiousness dyads significantly outperformed the other teams. In contrast, heterogeneous dyads were not different from the lowconscientiousness dyads. These data confirm the central role of the conscientiousness trait in predicting performance, extending it to workgroups and not just individuals. They also show that members with high scores in the conscientiousness trait must be paired with similarly high individuals in the same trait to have a competitive advantage.