What are Team Dynamics in the Workplace?
"Team dynamics" refers to the interplay between the various personalities in a team, which is based on the distribution of various personality types. Understanding the dynamics at play in a workforce is crucial to helping employees work with one another effectively.
Personality types in team dynamics
The distribution of personality types like the following is the key to grasping team dynamics in your workplace. Common personality types include:
- extrovert vs introvert
- dominant vs submissive
- cooperative vs confrontational
- proactive vs passive
- logical vs intuitive
- individualist vs group-worker, etc
The large number of personality types and their interactions under varying work conditions, is what drives "Group Dynamics", and has been the focus of much speculative research and theorising, including:
- Belbins theory of 8 team roles.
- Myers Briggs.
- The Merrill-Reid personality types
- 3 NLP modality types.
- Four fundamental personality types: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.
- Astrological Birth signs, Aries, Scorpio, Taurus
Over many years, there have been literally thousands of conceptual models, each one claiming to make sense of harmonising the many different personality types.
The question is, which model, if any, is the most correct and how would we know?
Improving team performance by understanding personality types
However much we may vary as individuals, it is important to remember that we all fall within the category of "human beings" and so, although we are each a unique combination of personality factors, we share a lot in common with everyone else in the team.
So, rather than focus on what makes us different from other team members, it may be more beneficial to find out what unites us.
Therefore, we need to ask, what attributes do we all have in common - which may act as the "common frame of reference" to which we could all subscribe - irrespective of our individual idiosyncratic differences?
If we knew what attributes we could rightly ask members of the group to sign-up to, irrespective of their individual traits and personality types, then we may discover a framework that could underpin all successful group dynamics, and thus improve team performance.
The three laws of effective team dynamics
We believe that all members of the group would (and should), live by the following three self-evident laws of effective team dynamics:
Clarity, rationality, positivity.
To create an effective team dynamic, people need to:
- Have a clear vision for a better future and be working towards its attainment.
- Write rational plans, that are capable of achieving the goals they set at point one.
- Express only positive intentions to other members, based upon the implementation of the plans we set at point two, to achieve the better future that we set at point one.
Clarity, rationality and positivity underpin "the dynamics of all effective team working".
team dynamics
Team dynamics is how people in a work group act and respond to each other. It needs at least two members talking and working together, grows from their mix of personal qualities, roles and actions, changes when people, jobs or setting shift, and it strongly steers the team’s results and mood.
CG4D Definition
Context: Business
Genus: Process
- Needs interaction between at least two members of the same work group
- Comes from the blend of members’ personal qualities, roles and actions
- Changes when the people, tasks or setting alters
- Directly shapes the team’s results and morale
Article Summary
When leaders treat every mix of personality types as a shared human team, and guide work with clear goals, rational plans and a positive tone, team dynamics change from clash to cooperation, driving output and profit up by double digits.