Do you know your partner's personality through virtual collaboration or negotiation? Investigating perceptions of personality and their impacts on performance

Abstract

Interpersonal skills, including collaborative problem solving (CPS) and negotiation skills, are essential in many aspects of the 21st century. With the rapid development of technologies in the past decades, it has become increasingly prevalent for collaborations, negotiations, and communications to occur virtually. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from in-person interactions to virtual interactions. On the other hand, personality traits, enduring characteristics of individuals that are largely stable over time, affect a wide variety of human behaviors, including how people interact with each other. In this study, we investigated the extent to which team members' personalities, the heterogeneity in personalities among team members, and the interaction processes in virtual tasks impacted performance on these tasks with limited exposure to personal information such as appearance and voice. In addition, we examined how one perceived the team partner's personality and how people tended to project their own personality onto partners during the short-term virtual interactions. Findings suggested that higher heterogeneity in personality between partners was associated with better team negotiation performance, while it was not associated with collaboration outcomes in the CPS task. Implications of the findings and limitations of this research were also discussed.