Much of the efforts of business today are focused around the use of teams and groups to achieve the goals necessary to make the organization successful. The theory is that the output of a well functioning team will be greater than the sum of the individual efforts of the team members working on their own. While this may be true, achieving a level of performance that brings about this multiplying effect is, at best, difficult.
Stewart L. Tubbs (2001) presents a Systems Model of how groups function and interact. Tubbs Model consists of three main components; relevant background factors, internal influences and consequences. The key to the systems model is that each main part interacts with and affects the other parts (p. 21). Each of these main parts is then made up of sub-components. The sub-parts of Tubbs relevant background factors include personality, sex, age health, attitudes, and values (p. 105). The main focus of this paper is the personality types and how differences in personality can affect group behavior and performance.
Each person has a different personality type, or lens that they view the world through. These lenses filter and distort each persons view and perception of different situations and other people. Tubbs maintains that the more similar others are to us the more comfortable we will be with them, and that the converse is also true, that different personality types will sometimes make one feel uncomfortable with the other person. (p. 133). .
One of the most common methods of judging personality types is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI is based on the psychology of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist of the early twentieth-century, and expanded on by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Briggs in the later half of the century. The MBTI breaks personality type into four basic parts; how the person is energized consisting of extroversion verses introversion, how information is processed by sensing verses intuition, how the person makes decisions by either thinking or feeling, and how the person organizes their world by judging verses perceiving.