Tackling adversity with open minds: Team personality composition facilitates shared leadership and team resilience

Abstract

Resilient teams can efficiently resolve disruption and overcome adversity. Despite growing interest in building and maintaining resilient teams, our understanding of the factors that promote team resilience necessitates further theorizing and empirical testing. Based on conservation of resources and shared leadership theories, we propose that team member personality (i.e., mean openness to experience) serves as a resource that facilitates team resilience via shared leadership. Further, we argue that the strength of influence of shared leadership on team resilience is contingent on the variance of openness to experience scores among team members. We draw our conclusions from three studies (i.e., two recall experiments and a multi-source field study) involving working professionals in virtual teams. Our findings shed light on the interactive role of team member personality in explaining team resilience, thereby extending our knowledge of the personality predictors of shared leadership and team resilience.