Where Did Your Team's Personality Diversity Go?

Your team is getting along beautifully, which is every manager’s dream. But what if that dream is costing you in ways you cannot immediately see? 

If you’ve had the same team for a long time, you might be entering dangerous territory. While smooth meetings and less conflict sound ideal, a sign that you’re doing everything right, they could also signal that your team has stopped disagreeing at all, and the personality diversity that once sparked healthy debate has slowly drained away. 

So how do you tell the difference between genuine harmony and a team that has become too similar to see its own blind spots? 

The Attraction-Selection-Attrition Model 

The Attraction-Selection-Attrition (ASA) model is an organizational psychology theory created by Benjamin Schneider in 1987. It states that an organization's culture is shaped and kept alive by the specific types of people it attracts, hires and retains over time. The three core steps are:

• Attraction: Job seekers are drawn to companies that share their personal values, goals and work style.
• Selection: Companies onboard employees who fit well with their existing team members and cultural norms.
• Attrition: Team members who do not fit in or share the company values tend to leave over time. 

The ASA model has its strengths. It typically improves teamwork because employees think alike. And it builds a strong, united culture across the team.

The downside is that teams naturally drift toward personality homogeneity over time. You hire similar people because you want them to fit in well, while those who do not fit the dominant mold leave of their own accord because they struggle to fit in. The result is a set of employees who think, act and approach problems the exact same way, essentially serving as their own echo chamber. 

Entering a sameness landscape can lead to major strategic blind spots.

The Cost of Personality Sameness 

Highly uniform teams are prone to groupthink. This happens when there’s no “alternative” thinker or person willing to play devil’s advocate and challenge the group’s ideas. Groupthink leads to a host of problems, including:

• One-note brainstorming and problem-solving.
• Lack of innovation and creative thinking.  
• Similar risk profiles, which can either reduce or increase risk-taking depending on the profile of the team.
• Too much attention to detail or too little.
• A lack of constructive criticism or healthy disagreements.
• Less adaptability when unusual circumstances arise.
• Blind spots, which your team’s personality style overlooks due to a lack of an opposite perspective.

To give that some context, let’s look at personality diversity through the lens of one of the world’s most popular workplace personality tools, the DISC assessment.

Personality Sameness and the Four DISC Styles

DISC measures behavior across four primary work styles: Drive, Influence, Support and Clarity. Each style brings a different instinct to the table, and that instinct impacts everything from how someone makes decisions and manages conflict to how they respond to stress, communicate and lead teams. 

When a team skews heavily toward one or two styles, it loses the natural counterbalance the other styles would normally provide.

When Drive Dominates the Team

Drive types are assertive, bold, outgoing leaders who approach challenges head-on and often act before they have fully thought things through. A team populated with Drive types will be great at taking bold action, but it also means they prefer to get things done right away rather than working through a list of all possible solutions. While certainly capable of creative thinking, their preference for the quickest, most executable solution means they actually tend to follow convention or choose the first best answer, missing the more abstract and innovative options available to them. 

That same appetite for action makes them ultra-comfortable with risk. They're prone to trusting their instincts before analyzing everything that could go wrong, and their preference for checking things off the list means they aren't the best at work that demands hypervigilance and detail. They may miss errors or weaknesses in their own projects. 

Because Drive types are so focused on results and statistics, they're also apt to overlook how their decisions affect co-workers. As leaders and team members, they can easily miss the overwhelmed teammate who is battling against a fast-moving deadline and quick-turnaround projects they wish they'd had more time to perfect.

When Influence Takes Over

Influence types are innovative, optimistic and enthusiastic team members. They are motivated by collaboration and the opportunity to persuade and influence others. However, the same optimism that charms and uplifts everyone around them means they lack the skepticism required to spot looming risks. Like Drive types, their preference for moving quickly can come at the cost of detail. 

They may also struggle to engage in healthy disagreement and instead adopt the group view in the hope of maintaining good working relationships. They'll add their two cents (often loudly!), but hesitate to examine the more negative sides of a conversation if the overall consensus runs against their opinion. 

Because Influence types are so optimistic and people-oriented, they can forget that every decision has a cost attached to it. An Influence-heavy team may have dozens of ideas but fail to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions about deadlines, procedures, team resources and risk.

When Support Runs the Show

Support types find motivation in helping others and building meaningful relationships at work. They are excellent team players, but their focus on others can make it hard for them to view problems (and their solutions) as separate from their relational impact. They may miss or outright reject disruptive or confrontational choices and decisions that reward one person, or the organization more broadly, at the expense of group peace. Support is the type most likely to stay quiet and avoid offering a differing opinion to protect good feelings in the team. 

A Support-heavy team is dependable, but they may struggle with changes and challenges they couldn’t have predicted. These types are focused on stability, and an unplanned scenario can leave them stressed and uncertain to the point where they see the status quo as the most harmonious option, even when it leads to stagnation. If your team is full of Support types, you may struggle to implement policy or procedural changes that would be uncomfortable at first but better in the long term.

When Clarity Becomes the Only Lens

Clarity types are focused on the task before them, which they complete with precision, attention to detail, diligence, high standards and analysis. These types are risk-averse, and they're determined to do their best work, so their standards often exceed what an assignment requires. That’s good for raising the quality of the team’s output. However, a Clarity-heavy team can become so bogged down in catching errors and overplanning that they miss deadlines. Team members might also insist on doing tasks independently, when delegating would be the better approach, because they worry others might not meet their exact standards. Teamwork suffers as a result.

Like Support types, Clarity types struggle to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. They prefer to work by the rules and may go into a functional freeze if the situation requires them to act before they know all the details. And because they're so focused on procedure and meeting high standards, a Clarity-heavy team can skip over the emotional state of their team or the impact their choices have on clients.

How to Diagnose and Map Your Team’s Personality Profile  

None of this is your team’s fault, and the good news is, it’s relatively easy to assess whether your team is drifting into sameness. Start by observing the everyday patterns of your employees and ask the following questions:

• In meetings and team discussions, does a chain reaction of head-nodding go around the room?
• Is anyone asking hard questions or sharing a new view?
• Does the group use the exact same ideas or approach for every new task? 
• Are people repeating the same phrase and opinions without defining them?
• How are they handling disagreement? Is there any at all?
• How does the team respond to last-minute changes?
• Does the team keep hitting the exact same blind spots or making the same mistakes across different projects?
• Does the team unite against criticism from other departments? 
• Do your brainstorming sessions produce ideas that look the same as they did last year?
• What were the employees who resigned like? How were they different from the current team members?

The answers to these questions should give you a rough idea of the personality types in the room. For a more accurate read, use tools like the DISC assessment,  TypeFinder® for the Workplace, Truity’s personality assessment based on Myers-Briggs, or another workplace assessment tool. The Truity@Work platform makes it easy to test every team member via a single portal, and the results will provide you with an official map of the team’s personality so you can analyze how alike your employees are. 

From there, you can make a conscious decision to rotate roles, assign a devil’s advocate, and shake up your team rituals, for example, by switching to silent brainstorming to stop the forced pressure of a similar group. These and other techniques can disrupt the patterns that sameness has settled into and bring a wider range of perspectives back into the room.