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Use of personality type as a means of team building

Sylvie Doré

École de technologie supérieure, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Introduction

As the pressure to develop better products faster and more cost effectively increases, the need to adopt a product development methodology becomes more pressing. However, this methodology will never be more efficient than the people who implement it and use the tools that support it.

Many factors affect team composition such as product complexity, design methodology and design environment, to name a few. A team assembled to develop a complex product using a concurrent engineering methodology in an international setting will be very different than one put together to design a simple product, in-house, using a more classical sequential approach. As more and more products are created in the conditions described in the former example, the emphasis on instilling good teamwork skills to our students becomes greater.

This paper reports on a teambuilding method, based on personality type as defined by Myers- Briggs, which has been implemented as part of a first year, first semester course on Computerized Product Development. The next section introduces the concept of personality type followed by a section on how it can be used in the context of teamwork. The third part describes the course while the fourth section concentrates on the team building activities per se. The emphasis is placed on means of avoiding conflicts before they arise within the team.

Throughout this paper, the word conflict is used to depict a situation where people not only have divergent opinions but where antagonists harvest feelings against one another, where strong irritants are present. It is the type of situation which usually undermines the effectiveness of a team when left unresolved. It is to be contrasted with a disagreement which, through proper discussion and exchange of points of views, can lead to improvements.

Personality types

Type theory takes its origin in the work of Carl Jung. After having juggled with a few theories which he found too limiting, he eventually elaborated a unifying theory encompassing his own earlier work and views of some contemporaries such as Alfred Adler and predecessors such as Sigmund Freud 1 .

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Doré, S. (2002, June), Use Of Personality Type As A Means Of Team Building Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10372