Intelligence, personality, creativity and behaviour: the antecedents of superior team performance

Abstract

<p>A recent Conference Board of Canada study concluded that the competitive edge today often comes from people-related factors (Gibb-Clark, 1995). Many organizations have tried to achieve a competitive edge by selecting creative people, putting people in teams to facilitate problem solving and offering creativity training. But what are the traits and behaviours that these organizations try to select for, facilitate and develop? Do teams that perform a variety of different tasks, perform better when they have creative people? We studied autonomous work team members that had been working together for 13 weeks. We found that extroverted and intelligent individuals are evaluated by fellow team members as being more creative than introverted and less intelligent individuals. We did not find support for the use of openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness or neutroticism as predictors of creativity in autonomous work teams. Creative team members were found to exhibit specific types of behaviours. The greater the team's creativity, as determined by averaging each team member's peer-assessed creativity score, the better the team performs. Implications of these findings for the staffing and development of effective teams are discussed.</p>