Impact of personality traits and team criteria on construction team performance

This dissertation investigated how personality traits and team criteria influence team performance in real construction projects. Though personality influence on team performance has been significantly investigated in other business sectors, the literature revealed that the construction industry lacks investigations regarding personality influencing team performance. The existing literature revealed that the Big Five Factors (BFF) was the most popular assessment tool for personality. Thus, this dissertation adopted the 50-Item Personality questionnaire developed by Goldberg, which consited of extraversion, aggreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The literature also revealed several common team criteria to evaluate team performance: team member satisfaction, shared values/goals/culture, commitment/responsibility, communication/information sharing, and trust/respect. This investigation aimed to find what personality traits influence team performance in construction projects and determine the accuracy of the personality traits and team criteria conditions. The qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) revealed that personality traits influence team performance only in combination with team criteria. It also revealed that agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experiance are the most influential traits in the sampled construction projects. QCA also revealed team criteria conditions were the most influential and that trust and respect must be present in construction teams to achieve high team performance. This dissertation provided valuable findings to the construction industry by demonstrating that personality traits and team criteria are influence team performance. The practical implication of the results is that construction stakeholders must value trust/respect and use personality, especially agreeableness, to access and maintain trust/respect levels during the project's construction phase.