Abstract

Team or group work has become the quasi-standard in teaching when it comes to alternatives for the traditional lecture. Since team work also causes problems like social loafing or dissatisfaction, we study the potential improvement of team work in a small IS course through the usage of personality traits. Personality traits that describe humans in stereotypes and allow to understand behavior, have been studied in different areas of IS and other disciplines. The usage of characteristics to optimize teams have not yet been considered. We present the first application of personality traits in a small seminar at a German university. Teams with specific personality characteristics (neuroticism and conscientiousness) performed better than the control group. We further observed differences in terms of shared mental models in relation to the personality traits.

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