Does Compatibility of Personality Affect Productivity? Exploratory Study with Construction Crews

Abstract

Crew productivity is a function of how efficiently labor is utilized in the construction process. However, previous research in construction has not comprehensively investigated the relationship between personality and crew productivity. This paper uses personality profiles to investigate a new fundamental concept, the relationship between compatibility of personality and crew productivity at the task level. Twenty-eight masons completed a revised questionnaire of the Big Five to indicate their personality. Personality scores were used to calculate compatibility in each of the 20 participating two-mason crews working on eight projects. Regression analysis was performed to establish the relationship between compatibility and crew productivity. Results show that that there is a high positive correlation between compatibility and crew productivity. Compatibility accounts for more than half of the predictable variance in productivity. This paper makes four major contributions: it proposes a new metric to measure compatibility of personality among workers in a crew; it reveals how personality factors affect productivity; it provides rigorous methods to analyze correlations (using confidence intervals and Bayesian inference) for construction experiments; and it provides theoretical contributions to advancing the theory of personality and productivity in construction projects.