Unravelling the Personality Gap in Multidisciplinary Teams

This major research project aimed to explore how personality can be considered a dimension of diversity in improving the effectiveness of multidisciplinary teams in organizations. This exploration involved the review of existing literature and a mixed-method approach to gain insight on how organizations consider and apply personality and diversity in a multidisciplinary team context. The mixed-method approach included anonymous surveys and confidential interviews of participants from small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and large organizations. The overall findings of the survey and interview data reveal that many value diverse personality types in the workplace and believe it could enhance team effectiveness. However, there is a gap in how organizations can maximize the personality differences of their team members to achieve better effectiveness. The findings also indicate that this gap can be closed by integrating personality as a dimension of diversity in the workplace, which will lead to a better understanding of the personality types in multidisciplinary teams. This report recommends that organizations integrate personality as a dimension of diversity using a framework that allows employees' personalities to be continuously considered from the hiring process, performance evaluation, and throughout the team lifecycle stages. The creation of this recommended framework requires further research on various areas identified in this report's discussion and recommendation section