Maximizing Team Performance by Understanding Extraversion

Different personality compositions are differentially suited to tackle different tasks. Understanding your team’s personality can help you identify strengths and weaknesses among your team members. This in turn can facilitate greater communication among team members and help make sure that everyone is playing to their strengths.  

Extraversion is the personality dimension of positive emotions. People high in Extraversion generally feel more positive emotions than people low in Extraversion. They tend to be outgoing, tell jokes (often dark and dirty jokes), and are usually considered the life of the party. 

Extraversion can be understood as a person’s sensitivity to rewards. Extraversion breaks down into Assertiveness and Enthusiasm. The different aspects of Extraversion are differentially associated with different types of rewards:

• • Incentive reward:
    
    • • Feeling rewarded for getting a maker that indicates that you have made progress towards a goal

• • Consummatory reward:
    
    • • Feeling rewarded for actual goal attainment.

Put differently, an incentive reward is a cue that one is moving toward a goal, whereas a consummatory reward is the actual attainment of a goal.

Assertiveness

People high on Assertiveness generally speak their minds and can sometimes be overwhelming in social settings. Furthermore, because of their incentive reward sensitivity, they thrive on having a goal to work towards. A corollary of this, however, is that they can feel bad when they don’t have something to work towards.

• • Tip: Ensure that your team members who are high on Assertiveness always have a goal to work towards.

Enthusiasm

People high on Enthusiasm tend to be happy people. They feel abundant positive emotions more easily than people who are low on Enthusiasm. Due to their consummatory reward sensitivity, they feel most satisfied when completing a task.

• • Tip: Ensure that you reward your team members who are high on Enthusiasm after they complete a task important to you. In other words, don’t let good effort go unnoticed as their primary driver is consummatory rewards!
    
    • • Example: Rewards can be in the form of praise!

• • Tip: Keep an eye on your team members who are low on Enthusiasm. They feel less neurologically rewarded, per unit of reward, compared to their high Enthusiasm counterparts. In other words, you need to reward them more for them to actually feel rewarded!
    
    • • Explanation: Don’t mistake their lower sensitivity for rewards as an indicator that they don’t appreciate you!