Best Personality Tests for Team Building

Team friction comes at a cost. 

Projects stall. Progress gets derailed. Team meetings become a waste of time. 

Worse, friction within a team can turn into resentment, contempt, or the silent checking out of a previously valuable member.

And that friction can keep products from being shipped, delay launches, or cut into profits. 

Since teams naturally include a variety of people, friction issues often get filed under “personality differences.” The next natural step is to go looking for a personality test for team building, hoping the right one will help you either right the wrongs or at least avoid the same scenarios in the future. 

But before choosing a personality assessment for teams, it’s worth asking:

What problem are you trying to solve?

If your goal is to better understand your people, improve communication, and reduce unnecessary conflict, then personality assessments can be a valuable part of the solution.

Personality tests for team building: what do they do, exactly?

A team building personality test sounds fun, but for a leader, manager, HR consultant, or entrepreneur, it could be a critical tool for understanding a team and cutting friction off before the stakes hit the P&L sheet.

Personality assessment tools are well-established for building self-awareness and creating a shared understanding among teams. They provide a common framework for describing how people think, solve problems, and approach their work, which can improve communication, collaboration, and empathy.

However, they are weakly supported as tools for predicting an individual's performance or helping you make your next team hire. 

• Do: use them to better understand the personal and relational dynamics in a team.
• Don’t: expect them to provide the answer to, “Should I hire/ fire this person?”

Does science support personality assessments for team performance?

Your team is made up of humans. And humans are wired for connection and built for relationships. 

They’re also individuals made up of unique personalities, patterns, and ways of operating and showing up in the world. 

Which means sometimes one team member’s patterns and modus operandi can show up in opposition to someone else’s. 

Some of these personality traits can have a direct impact on team performance.

When researchers performed a meta-analysis on personality traits and team performance, they found that two traits in particular were linked to better performance:

• Agreeableness: your relationship to harmony
• Conscientiousness: your relationship to structure

Despite these findings, there’s no “perfect” personality profile for your team members to possess. 

Researchers using an Agent-Based Model (ABM) of the Big Five personality traits found that the ideal personality trait for team performance can change based on the type of task at hand. 

For tasks with noise—think open-ended tasks such as entrepreneurship or managing organizational behavior—a team leaning more harmonious/agreeable and willing to prioritize emotional safety and relational ease in a group produced the best results. 

However, for tasks with no noise—tasks with definitive solutions, such as accounting—a team that leans more challenging/lower agreeableness and is more willing to move toward tension or push back on assumptions performed better.

In short: science supports certain personality traits as more likely to predict better team performance, but the research also recognizes that better performance is dependent on the task at hand. 

When misunderstanding is the problem, not personality.

Most workplace conflict isn’t intentional. Sure, you may occasionally come across a person within a group, team, or organization who thrives on chaos and discord. But the reality is that most disharmony doesn’t come from a single villainous team member intent on sabotaging everyone around them.

It comes from misunderstanding.

Trouble begins when people misinterpret each other’s patterns of behavior. 

“She’s so controlling.”

“He doesn’t care.”

“They make every conversation a fight.”

Are they really too quiet, sensitive, or intense? 

Or are they simply misunderstood?

Over time, these misunderstandings begin to shape assumptions. They become frustration, and that frustration becomes conflict.

That’s why relational intelligence (RQ) is so important in a group or team setting. 

Self-awareness is great for fostering effective teams, but relational intelligence can help people understand how they are likely to be experienced by others. Even better, RQ can help you understand how someone else’s patterns relate to their personality and why they might behave in a particular way. It provides the groundwork for better relationships.

Teams struggle when people misunderstand each other.

That’s why relational intelligence is a valuable leadership tool. 

Personality assessments for reducing team friction

One way to utilize a personality assessment for team building is to consider an assessment tool that provides personal insights and relational intelligence insights, like SHEER Personality.

SHEER Personality is grounded in established personality science and designed as a relational intelligence framework.

The SHEER Personality assessment measures where your team members fall individually across five personality dimensions. Instead of a set “type,” these dimensions show where someone sits along a spectrum. 

The result is a constellation: a shape that indicates someone’s personality traits along these spectrums. 

Like many individual assessment tools, SHEER Personality provides insights that allow you to see yourself clearly and foster better self-awareness. See how it works.

Where SHEER excels as a personality assessment for team building and improving relational intelligence (RQ) is its ability to:

• Highlight where you can easily be misunderstood by others based on your unique constellation (and how to work around these areas).
• Overlay team member constellations to easily see the distance and gaps between dimensions and identify possible areas of friction.

Here’s how that works in real-life team-based scenarios.

Individual insights

An individual takes the SHEER Personality assessment and realizes that they lay on the Reflective end of the Expression dimension. That means this person often needs time to think before responding, processes information internally, and their thoughts become clearer after they’ve had time to sort through them on their own. 

This insight feels accurate to the individual; they do prefer time and space to process information. 

But their assessment results also reveal something they haven’t considered before:

That same Reflective quality can often be misread by others, who assume they are disengaged or uninterested in the conversation at hand. They may appear “checked out” in meetings as they sit back and listen without contributing, or even be mislabeled as “rude” or “problematic” by teammates who want to talk through a problem in real time. 

Understanding where they are on the Expression dimension, and how that could be misinterpreted by someone who leans more Expressive than Reflective, provides valuable insights that can ease friction in team situations.

All it takes is one small moment in a meeting or other team environment to say: “I just need a minute to process this before I can weigh in. I’m still here with you.”

Constellation overlays

As a team leader, you may be able to see the potential for pitfalls or friction before your team does by exploring, or overlaying, personality constellations.

It’s common to see friction between team members when there is a large gap along one dimension.

Let’s say you have two team members positioned on opposite ends of the Structure dimension.

• One team member is highly Structured. They thrive with systems, due dates, clear expectations, and anticipated next steps.
• Another team member is highly Adaptive. They thrive when they can pursue a goal creatively, flexibly, and with the freedom to adjust and adapt in the moment. 

In a team environment, it’s easy to see that trying to get both of these team members operating within the same system, working on the same goal, in the same way, could create tensions, friction, and misunderstandings.

Acknowledging these gaps along dimension lines allows you, as the team leader, to call out the tension before it leads to disrupted trust, missed deadlines, or contempt between the team members. 

And it allows for a conversation about how to structure the environment and systems in a way that works best for both, not just one or the other. 

Personality tests for teams that reveal a type or a strength can have their place in helping foster better self-awareness or self-understanding for an individual team member. 

But an assessment that reveals where two people sit along a personality dimension can go even further to improve the relationships between them. 

AI-powered personalized Insights 

SHEER Personality provides personalized insights based on your results through the Insight Guide, an AI-powered guide that helps you better understand your personality report and apply those insights to your everyday life.

Instead of handing over a report, personality type, or a score, the Insight Guide provides practical, personalized guidance that helps individuals apply their results to real-world situations.

Including group and team dynamics.

For team leaders, that means less time sifting through reports and thinking about how to resolve conflict or prevent delays.

For individuals, it's an easy way to get a roadmap or guidance through a situation, especially if they have an understanding of a teammate’s constellation.

Ask the Insight Guide how to better communicate with a team member, navigate a group dynamic, or inspire your group to meet the goal.

Building teams that understand each other

Personality assessments that reveal a type or identify strengths can be valuable tools for helping people better understand themselves. 

But building better teams takes more than understanding personality: it takes developing relational intelligence between group members.

Understanding yourself is the first step. Understanding one another is what transforms the way teams communicate, collaborate, and succeed.

Ready to see if a relational intelligence assessment can provide greater insight and less friction in your team? Try SHEER Personality for your team today. 

Take the assessment.