1.5 Teamwork

Openness refers to the extent to which a person is open to new experiences. Is the person trying to experiment with something new or are they rather conservative?

Conscientiousness refers to the degree to which a person is well organized, is disciplined and persistent. Do they show discipline and plan or are they rather chaotic?

Extraversion refers to the extent to which someone likes being close to and communicate with other people. Do they enjoy social interaction or are they earlier introverted?

Agreeableness refers to the extent to which a person adapts to other people. Do they tend to take other people into account in their thinking or are they rather dominant?

Neurotism refers to the degree to which a person is emotionally stable. Are they a quiet someone or are they easily triggered emotionally?

In addition to these personality factors, proactivity (the extent to which you look ahead and look to the future) appears also have an important influence on the success of a team. Research shows that a team with a combination of someone who is conscientious with someone who is proactive, more likely to innovate and implement. The condition is that they can communicate well with each other.

A survey by Zhao et al. (2010) showed that conscientiousness and openness to experiences predicted the performance of the company, while neurotism had a negative effect on performance. Their research also showed that the personality “only” roughly 10 percent of the performance predicted. In other words, we must see personality in a wider context in combination with other factors that can affect the performance of the company to influence.

Finally, two overview studies point to the impact of self-efficacy of entrepreneur(s) on the performance (Rauch & Frese, 2007; Miao et al., 2017). Self-efficacy is faith from a person that he or she has the ability to monitor his or her behavioral performance to achieve what he or she intends or wants (Bandura, 1997). In other words, the extent to which the entrepreneur believes that he or she is capable of running a business and that they can manage and influence the results of their business.

All in all, research tells us that entrepreneur(s) who score high on openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, proactivity and self-efficacy together with low score on neurotism show the right combination to have a better chance of a successful business.

Teamwork is central to the operation of a company. There is a lot of scientific conducted research into the conditions for teams to function optimally for qualitative communication and innovative output. Below we will go into more detail about three key elements for good to work in a team: the team climate, constructive controversy and reflection.

Doorzetten