Modeling psychometrics for team performance: Personality & Emotional Intelligence

As challenges faced by organizations have become more complex, there has been an increase in the formation and use of teams and teamwork. To develop a team that can function efficiently and have a high-performance output is difficult to formulate. The psychological definitions of an individual such as personality and emotional intelligence have previous research that states, separately, that these psychometric constructs can improve team performance. Therefore, by quantitatively combining an individual's characteristics and understanding how they perform at a team-level can inform team selection techniques.;According to the literature on Emotional Intelligence (EI), there is a mixed model that relates to the commonly agreed upon Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. Although these two psychometric constructs are treated as distinctly different measures, their potential relationships could be a powerful indicator and tool toward understanding how individuals come together to develop overall team performance, especially with complex tasks.;The primary goal of this dissertation is to improve team performance modeling for teams based on mathematical quantification of interactions of personality and emotional intelligence. This work explores the relationships between personality and emotional intelligence as they relate to team performance by investigating these two psychometric constructs separately and together, while testing aggregation methods, task types, individual- and team-level performance, and communication as a mediating variable.;We utilized two different contexts to collect data: a controlled group environment (individuals performing together to complete an Anti-Air Warfare Coordinator (AAWC) simulation) and a more natural group setting (multiple years of team project data from undergraduate engineering courses).;First, we considered the degree to which the Five Factor Model construct at both an individual and team extraversion is predictive of the overall performance of dyadic teams in an AAWC simulation setting, via mediation from communication. Then, we expanded the team level analysis from the previous study to include all personality metrics with four aggregated methods in the same AAWC setting. After the AAWC setting, we transitioned from a laboratory environment to the academic environment. Within the academic setting, emotional intelligence was investigated as it related to performance at a team-level, using multiple aggregation methods and task types. Based on the previous results in conjunction with the literature, the discrepancy on how team interpersonal skills related to team performance for a specific task was explored with communication as a mediating variable. In the same academic environment, this research concludes by examining the two psychometric constructs together to see how they relate to one another and performance on both an individual and team level.;Our results show that the complex relationships between personality and emotional intelligence can be quantified statistically, however there are many nuances to the interpretation of these relationships and how they could be implemented in concrete ways to improve team performance. Emotional Intelligence does predict team performance, however the relationships are dependent on aggregation method and task type. Additionally, our research concludes that verbal communication can be an effective mediator (i.e., an intermediate variable) for personality to team performance at a team level. Overall, both psychometrics are inter-related with definable, intricate relationships that can indeed predict team performance using different aggregation methods and task types.