Beneficial Personality Factors of Team Members

One challenge to team work is the simple matter of getting different personalities to collaborate. Anyone who has ever served on a committee will likely appreciate that getting people to collaborate constructively on any project can be challenging. One useful strategy is to choose team members at the outset with personality characteristics that are conducive to interdisciplinary collaboration.

These personality characteristics include:

· Willingness to cope with complexities and uncertainties

· Openness to other theories and methods

· Willingness to devote lots of time to learning what others know

· Valuing collaboration, having collaborative experience

· Time management and information management skills

· Willingness to devote time to learning about others

· Passion for the work

· Penetrating intellectual curiosity

· Intellectual tenacity, even courage

· Perseverance

The first six are stressed in Shalini Misra, Kara Hall, Annie Feng, Brooke Stipelman, and Daniel Stokols “Collaborative processes in td work,” Ch8 in Kirst, M.J. et al. (Eds.), Converging Disciplines: A Transdisciplinary Research Approach to Urban Health Problems. New York. Springer, 2011.

The last four are from Kessel, F.S., Rosenfield, P. L., & Anderson, N. B. (Eds.). Interdisciplinary research: Case studies from health and social science (2nd ed.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

It is useful to compare this list with that in Interdisciplinary Habits of Mind