Personality and Behavioral Tools for Managing Team Conflict

This essay discusses the use of personality and behavioral tools like Myers-Briggs personality test, DISC model, Johari window and TA models to manage team conflict in an organizational setting. The author shares their experience of managing a team of five members with different knowledge backgrounds and how the use of these tools helped them to mitigate conflicts and improve team performance.

Running head: WORK AND DIVERSITY
WORK AND DIVERSITY
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author's Note:

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This this essay aims to discuss the effect of personality and behavior in the management
of a team particularly assigned for a project. This essay will be analyzing various factors that
have been found through different types of personality and psychological tests. These tools
actually help individuals to understand the factors of their personality that impact on their
responses and understanding of a specific matter. This essay will therefore, discuss the tools like
Myers-Briggs personality test, DISC model, Johari window and TA models to understand the
reasons of the conflict among the members and finding the methods to mitigate these problems.
This conflict is related with the team assigned under me for achieving the goals of one
particular project. As a project manager, I was responsible to motivate the team members to
apply their own ideas and understanding in the project success. This was a team of five members
who had different knowledge background and their assistance were required for the smooth
running of the project. During the time span of the project, the problem of misunderstand and
miscommunication increased. This is due to the fact that these five team members did not have
idea about their own personalities nor of the others. This is the reason why they behaved
according to their own choice. Thus, the coordination among these people became very tough for
me. In restoring the integrity among these members was essential as without this the success of
the project became impossible. In this respect, the tools mentioned above helped me a great deal
to understand the expectation of the team members and respond them according to their
requirements. Thus, I could solve the coordination problems in the team members and they
themselves took initiatives to develop their own skills.
Johari Window is a tool that helps the people to understand their open and hidden
personal qualities (Mardani, Jusoh and Zavadskas 2015). This technique is mainly followed by
the corporate houses as Heuristic exercises. There is a specific type of qualities based on which

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the personalities of the individuals are identified (Ekinci, Calderon and Siala 2016). According to
Johari Window, there are some qualities in every person about whom he either know or do no
know. In some cases, the person has no idea about such quality but the people around him
possess knowledge about this. In order to identify about these qualities Johari Window, help
efficiently. These qualities are to be found in the four cells or window panes of this tool. These
cells are Façade or hidden, open or area, bind spot and unknown (Chang et al. 2017). The
qualities of the open cell, are known to both the person as well as the people around him. The
qualities in the blind spot, are not known to the person himself but others around him can
associate with him. qualities in the hidden self, are not known to others around him, but only that
person can associate with himself. The qualities in the unknown cell, are neither known to the
person himself nor to the persons others around him. This method helped myself as well as the
other five team members to know their personal qualities both open and hidden to be aware in
the future (Miller and Le 2017). This personal awareness helped them to identify their
weaknesses so that they can transform those weaknesses in to strength.
The DISC model is also associated with the behavior and response of the persons which
they show to communicate with others. This tool is consisted of four factors which are
dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness. This model is a behavior assessment
tool which measure the tendencies and preferences. This also measures the response of the
persons in complicated situation (Ten et al. 2017). In the conflict situation I used this particular
tool and found its validity. Through this particular model I have identified myself to be
influencing and steady which are to help me to be focused on my people. These models helped
all the team members to identify their inclination to the task orientation of people orientation.
Through this self-awareness, I have identified a gradual behavioral change of my team members.

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The knowledge diversity in the team I had to amalgamate became quite easy as these members
started to understand their points of the others and then incorporated their thoughts instead of
showing ignorance and egotism.
MBTI model or Myers-Briggs personality model is another very important tool that
helped me to mitigate most of the problems among the team which created conflicts due to
difference in thoughts and understanding in the team members (Espíritu-Olmos and Sastre-
Castillo 2015). This technique is an introspective self-report test which indicates about the
different personalities of the people. Through this test, the persons can identify their own
psychological preferences and own perspectives to see the people around them. Proper
understanding of these factors helps people to know one another, their expectations, ideology
and preferences based on which people start to expect things and behave with other and respond
in a critical situation (Wu and Lee 2017). Myers-Briggs personality model mainly deals with the
recognition of the personality traits of the people based on proper realization of four main factors
like extroversion and introversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling and finally judging
and perception scales.
The extroversion and introversion factors are the first facet of this tool which deals with
the communication style and knowledge gathering of the people with the external environment.
The extroverts converse with others, share their knowledge and gain the same from the
environment. There are more expressive that the introverts who believe in the self-discovery.
These people do not rely on the knowledge of the outer world but depend upon the self-
understanding and decisions. due to such reason the conflict in the team increased as some of the
members were not ready to understand the understanding of others. However, I also understood
my preference of communication also through this scale (Leutner et al. 2014). The sensing and

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intuition scale deals with the understanding of people though using their physical senses, some of
the team members preferred to understand the situation of the goals of the projects through their
learnings of the senses but of the members depended upon their intuitions which not always
helped them to understand all the matters related to the project. This is the reason why I used this
diverse type of people to take care of the different jobs which can be done through only senses or
intuition. This reduced the conflicts among them.
Thinking and feeling scales determine the decision-making process of the people. Some
of the people rely on their values but some depend upon the use of logical criteria to make
decisions. This is the reason why the conflict in the teams increase as no one is ready to rely on
the findings of the others hence cannot make decisions easily (Kallinen 2016). Finally, the
judging and perception scale helped me to point out the laid-back members of the team. Through
this scale I could identify which of the team members are purposeful and ambitious to do the
projects. These people prefer organized and structured rules as well as plans so that they can
achieve their own personal goals. Based on these factors I distributed task among my team
members and specified their responsibilities so that the project can be completed without mush
conflict and problems.
Finally, the Transactional Analysis or TA model helped me to identify the ego state of
each team members as well as of me. According to this particular model, there are three states of
ego which manipulate us to communicate, understand, behave and act in a certain situation.
These three states are parent state or the taught state, an adult state or the thought state and the
child state or the felt state (Miller 2016). The people while communicate with the similar ego
state do not feel uncomfortable nor develop any conflict but while communicating with other two
ego states feel problematic to cooperate. This is the reason why I tried all the team members to

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bring in the similar ego state so that distance and differences among them can be reduced and the
project get speed to be completed without any further problem.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the personality and behavioral tools such as the Johari
window, MBTI, TA and DISC, are potent enough to mitigate a type of conflict among the people
in an organiostioanl settings. Proper understanding of these factors helps people to know one
another, their expectations, ideology and preferences based on which people start to expect
things and behave with other and respond in a critical situation. Proper solution of such problems
can be easily mitigated when the understanding among the team members are known and
realized. Thus, the team members of this project could realize the importance of cooperation and
increased the team performance. These tools also supported the team leader to find quick answer
to these issues.

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References:
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Ekinci, Y., Calderon, J. and Siala, H., 2016. Do personality traits
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Kallinen, K., 2016, September. Behavioral Inhibition and Activation Personality Traits Moderate
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