Finding the ‘I’ in team:the moderating effects of team boundary management on the relationship between team personality traits and team performance

Abstract

With a rapidly changing landscape creating highly permeable team boundaries, the traditional team form has become the exception rather than the norm in contemporary organisations. A consequence of this is that management practitioners urgently need clarification of the considerations required to compose teams to positively influence team performance. Service Sector organisations whose main activities are rooted in knowledge work are prominent examples, as are other organisational forms whose dynamics create similarly challenging contextual conditions. With a century long tradition, team research has become a broad church and scholarly investigations have reported that boundary management improves performance through coordination, knowledge sharing, and access to scarce resources. Through the theoretical lenses of Trait Activation and Similarity Attraction, this research study investigated the relationships between Team Personality Traits and various Team Outcomes moderated by Team Boundary Management and Interdependence. Addressing calls for researchers to take a more nuanced approach to investigating the Personality and Performance relationship, this study applied a complex analytic strategy and evaluated a number of permutations of the variables in focus. In doing so it identified significant main, interaction and quadratic effects between Team Personality and Team Outcomes moderated by Team Boundary Management, including some of the conditions under which those relationships hold true. These results, and the understanding emanating from the analysis, contribute to theory and practice by extending existing knowledge and providing some new insights into the complexities and trade-offs associated with team composition where team personality traits are the team composition input variables.