Academic Research & Publications

Evidence-based research serves as the empirical foundation for my executive methodologies.

Completing my Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) thesis at Aston University represents a deep, quantitative investigation into how specific personality traits—often labelled the "Big Five"—influence workplace dynamics, team cohesion, and ultimate business performance outcomes. I continue to investigate and publish insights that bridge the gap between organisational psychology research and practical corporate leadership.

About my Doctoral Research Project

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. As a result, management practitioners urgently need clarification on the considerations for assembling 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. These results, and the understanding derived from the analysis, contribute to theory and practice by extending existing knowledge and providing new insights into the complexities and trade-offs associated with team composition when team personality traits are the input variables.

Summary

Drawing on career-long observations, I’ve been concerned about the practice of composing (and managing) teams in an increasingly complex, rapidly changing organisational context. Also, the utility of data derived from psychometric assessment of personality in the context of team composition and performance development, since the evolving team context puts a premium on pro-social behaviours (George, 1991; Martin-Raugh et al., 2016). These provide compelling reasons to assess personality to compose teams with a natural propensity for ‘desirable’ social behaviours (Penner et al., 1995).

This has already stimulated a large body of literature examining the antecedents of team performance, including the personality-performance relationship, as well as collaborative processes, such as Boundary Management. However, many of these studies have reported small effect sizes and equivocal results (Driskell et al., 1987, Mount et al., 1998, Porter et al., 2003), leaving scholars to posit that, justified by Trait Activation Theory, more complex models are required beyond the dyadic relationship between personality and performance. Similarly, although researchers have previously shown that Boundary Management activities predict a range of team outcomes. There is no literature or prior empirical studies examining the team composition variables needed to explain the role of boundary management in the personality-performance relationship. This creates a lacuna in our understanding and has prompted calls to consider deep-level compositional factors as antecedents of boundary management processes (Dey, 2017), a view further supported by Seibert and DeGeest (2017).

This research answers these calls and accepts the conclusions of prior scholars: that team composition is an important input variable of performance; that personality traits are an important input to team composition; and that boundary management is an important team process. This led me to the central question addressed by this research: How, when, and under what conditions do team personality traits influence team outcomes moderated by boundary management?

Collectively, these questions help address gaps in our theoretical and practical understanding, providing significant value in how to compose teams for optimal performance. Therefore, this research is important because it contributes to knowledge and practice regarding team composition at a time when teams commonly operate in distributed contexts; there is an increasing tendency towards flattening organisational structures; and the increased demand for lateral interactions between distributed team members creates a requirement for prosocial behaviours.