How Personality and Communication Patterns Affect Online ad-hoc Teams Under Pressure

Abstract

Critical, time-bounded, and high-stress tasks, like incident response, have often been solved by teams that are cohesive, adaptable, and prepared. Although a fair share of the literature has explored the effect of personality on various other types of teams and tasks, little is known about how it contributes to teamwork when teams of strangers have to cooperate ad-hoc, fast, and efficiently. This study explores the dynamics between 120 crowd participants paired into 60 virtual dyads and their collaboration outcome during the execution of a high-pressure, time-bound task. Results show that the personality trait of Openness to experience may impact team performance with teams with higher minimum levels of Openness more likely to defuse the bomb on time. An analysis of communication patterns suggests that winners made more use of action and response statements. The team role was linked to the individual's preference of certain communication patterns and related to their perception of the collaboration quality. Highly agreeable individuals seemed to cope better with losing, and individuals in teams heterogeneous in Conscientiousness seemed to feel better about collaboration quality. Our results also suggest there may be some impact of gender on performance. As this study was exploratory in nature, follow-on studies are needed to confirm these results. We discuss how these findings can help the development of AI systems to aid the formation and support of crowdsourced remote emergency teams.

Examining Team Dynamics in Virtual Reality (VR): Replicating Research Paradigms of Psychology

“…Surface-level attributes describe basic demographic characteristics such as ethnicity, age, and education level, whereas deep-level attributes refer to underlying psychological characteristics such as personality, attitudes, cognitive ability, and values (Bell, 2007;Chatzi, 2022). Personality is a common personal attribute in team composition that influences behavior through trait expression (Schmidt et al, 2012), and has been shown to have a significant impact on team processes and outcomes (Dillion et al, 2021;Kichuk & Wiesner, 1997;Vinella et al, 2022). Personality has been described as enduring traits or patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that characterize and differentiate individuals from one another (John et al, 2008;Roberts & Mroczek, 2008).…”