Managerial Leadership and Productivity

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         There is considerable evidence that an individual’s effectiveness as a manager is closely related to his or her ability to recognize, appreciate, and ultimately utilize key, fundamental differences among others (W&C, p. 60).  When applied to team dynamics the same is true; understanding the personalities of teammates enable the team to be more effective and function together to produce higher quality work.

Although working only through electronic means, the individual personalities of team members did materialize quickly.  The concept of personality refers to the relatively enduring combination of traits that makes an individual unique and at the same time produces consistencies in his or her thoughts and behaviors (W&C, p. 79).  Usually, personality refers to a “trait” of individuals inasmuch as it is relatively enduring and stable, even though it may be changed and developed through conscious effort (W&C, p. 79) From the “Big Five” personality attributes (W&C, p. 80), we will address three, as the other two, extraversion and emotional stability, did not become apparent in the short time we worked together.  Conscientiousness is the extent to which people are careful, task oriented, and orderly as opposed to being disorganized, flexible and unreliable ( W&C, p. 80). All team members exhibited very conscientious and thorough work.  This is likely due to the common shared goal of obtaining an “A” grade in the class.  This goal was determined early in our team building activity the first week of the term.  The next trait members of the team exhibited was agreeableness.  Agreeableness is the extent to which people are friendly and affable as opposed to being disagreeable and aggressive (W&C, p. 80).  The team was very cooperative and helpful to each other throughout the term.  Each team member demonstrated a common trait of openness.  Openness is the extent to which people are curious and open to new ideas as opposed to being rigid or dogmatic (W&C, p. 80).          

The advantage of a team in a formal education setting is that several of the usual inhibitors to effective teamwork are non-existent, such as not maintaining stable membership and not providing members with autonomy (W&C, p. 495).  Nonetheless, the positive benefits of a team are still prevalent, including an increased quality of products or assignments and increased participation in the class (W&C, p. 496).  It is unsurprising that in a short seven weeks our team was only able to progress to the beginning stages of storming (W&C, p. 501).  At first, the team dove right in with a task orientation mostly on behalf of a few natural leaders on the team (W&C, p. 498).  We were all grateful to avoid the indirect manner teams usually take to complete assignments during the forming stage so the rest of the group adopted a follower role, for the time being (W&C, p. 499).  The online format of the class deemphasized the interpersonal nature of the forming stage and sped the team into norming (W&C, p. 499).