Exploring the Relationship Between Team Personality and Team Dynamics in Construction Project Teams: A Literature Review

Team dynamics and personality play an essential role in the success of construction projects. Construction project teams comprise professionals working together to design, detail, and construct a project. Team dynamics impact the collaboration and interaction of these project teams. How and why some teams "click" better than others, can be described by the strength of their collective personality. In this ongoing study, we conducted a literature review to explore the relationship between team personality and team dynamics and examine how to derive group-level personality measures from individual member inputs. Our review recognized the existence of a strong relationship between team personality and team dynamics. Although previous research on team composition has examined the impact of individual team member personalities on their team functioning, only a few studies have inspected collective team personality and its effect on team dynamics. While some efforts have been made to derive overall team personalities from the mean or variance of individual team member personalities, the results are somewhat inconsistent. There is still less conclusive evidence showing how to determine group-level personalities. Our review also noted that the construction sector has not fully incorporated personality traits as team-level constructs in design and construction project teams. The combined personality of all team members, including the owner, architect, engineer, contractor, key subcontractors, and other subject matter experts lacks full integration into construction research. Implications and recommendations are presented at the end of this paper.