Teams are central to human accomplishment. Over the past half-century, psychologists have identified the Big-Five cross-culturally valid personality variables: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness. The first four have shown consistent relationships with team performance. Agreeableness (being harmonious, altruistic, humble, and cooperative), however, has demonstrated a non-significant and highly variable relationship with team performance. We resolve this inconsistency through computational modelling. An agent-based model (ABM) is used to predict the effects of personality traits on teamwork and a genetic algorithm is then used to explore the limits of the ABM in order to discover which traits correlate with best and worst performing teams for a problem with different levels of uncertainty (noise). New dependencies revealed by the exploration are corroborated by analyzing previously-unseen data from one the largest datasets on team performance to date comprising 3,698 individuals in 593 teams working on more than 5,000 group tasks with and without uncertainty, collected over a 10-year period. Our finding is that the dependency between team performance and Agreeableness is moderated by task uncertainty. Combining evolutionary computation with ABMs in this way provides a new methodology for the scientific investigation of teamwork, making new predictions, and improving our understanding of human behaviors. Our results confirm the potential usefulness of computer modelling for developing theory, as well as shedding light on the future of teams as work environments are becoming increasingly fluid and uncertain.
翻译:过去半个世纪以来,心理学家已经确定了五大跨文化间有效的个性变量:神经论、外向、开放、开放、自觉和可接受性。前四个与团队业绩表现出了一致的关系。但可接受性(和谐、利他主义、谦卑与合作)已经显示出与团队业绩的不重大和高度差异性关系。我们通过计算模型解决了这种不一致。一个基于代理的模型(ABM)被用来预测个性特征对团队合作和基因算法的影响,然后用来探索反弹道导弹的局限性,以便发现哪些特征与最佳和最差的团队在具有不同程度不确定性(噪音)的问题中具有关联性。通过分析迄今为止小组业绩的最大数据集所发现的新的依赖性(和谐、利利他主义、谦虚和合作性)已经证实了这一点。我们通过计算593个团队中的3,698个人在10年中收集了5 000多个具有不确定性且没有不确定性的团队任务。我们发现,团队业绩和可接受的基因算算算算法之间的依赖性,通过任务不确定性的理论来调整我们未来团队的演化和演化方法,将人类演化的演化潜力作为新的演化方法进行。