Rethinking Team Dynamics with Personality Insights
There’s a reason personality tests are perennial favorites in team retreats, professional development sessions, and organizational onboarding. They’re not just a fun exercise – they offer teams a shared language for understanding themselves and each other. But beyond individual insights, personality assessments can also serve a deeper purpose. They help teams avoid one of the most common traps in human behavior: the fundamental attribution error.
When used thoughtfully, these tools don’t just tell us who we are. They help us make sense of why others might think, act, and make decisions differently than we do, and they remind us that context matters more than we often recognize.
What are Personality Assessments?
Personality and leadership assessments, inventories, tests, and typologies aim to describe patterns in how people think, behave, and interact with the world around them. Some focus on strength areas (like the CliftonStrengths), others on motivations (like the Enneagram), and still others on work-related tendencies (like the Working Genius). Some assessments provide nuanced, research-based descriptions of individual preferences, while others offer accessible, memorable frameworks that help teams spark conversation and encourage reflection.
In our organizational transformation and leadership development work, we use a variety of these tools depending on the team, goals, and setting:
CliftonStrengths helps individuals understand what they do best and how to intentionally build their work around those strengths.
Enneagram reveals core motivations and how people respond to stress or growth.
MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) focuses on preferences related to energy, information, decision-making, and lifestyle.
The Four Frames helps leaders see their organization through structural, human resource, political, and symbolic lenses.
Working Genius identifies how individuals contribute to team and workgroup processes, whether they bring ideation, activation, or implementation skills and energy.
Big Five grounds individual differences in the five broad dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The Predictive Index uses behavioral science to align people strategy with business strategy.
No single tool captures the full complexity of a person, and they shouldn’t be treated as labels or prescriptions. But each can provide a valuable entry point into deeper understanding and empathy.
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
The fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as the correspondence bias, is a concept from psychology that refers to our tendency to overemphasize personal characteristics and underemphasize situational factors and context when interpreting others’ behaviors. Coined in the late 1970s by Lee Ross (1977), this cognitive bias leads us to assume that someone’s actions reflect who they are, rather than what’s happening around them. We’re quick to label others as careless, lazy, difficult, or even incompetent, without accounting for the constraints or context they might be navigating.
Classic studies on attribution theory by Heider (1958) and later by Jones and Harris (1967) laid the groundwork for this understanding. In one well-known experiment, participants read essays that were either pro- or anti-Castro (former president of Cuba) and were told that the essay writers had no choice in the position they argued. Despite this, participants still believed that the writers genuinely held the opinions expressed, demonstrating the power of this bias, even when we recognize that context matters.
The FAE frequently appears in the workplace. When a teammate misses a deadline, we may assume they’re disorganized or disengaged, rather than considering that they might be juggling competing demands or dealing with limited resources. When a colleague is quiet in a meeting, we might think they’re aloof or uninterested, instead of recognizing they may be processing internally or deferring to others’ expertise.
Interestingly, this bias doesn’t apply equally. Research suggests we’re more likely to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. When explaining our own actions, we lean on context: “I was late because of traffic.” When explaining others’ actions, we lean on character: “They were late because they’re unreliable.” This is called the actor-observer asymmetry (Jones & Nisbett, 1971), and it highlights just how much grace we reserve for ourselves compared to others.
At its core, the fundamental attribution error limits our ability to empathize and collaborate. It flattens people into caricatures and erodes trust, especially in diverse teams where work styles and communication norms may differ significantly. And it’s precisely where personality assessments can be transformative by offering alternative explanations for behavior, grounded in theory and research rather than assumptions.
Reframing Behavior: From Judgement to Curiosity
When teams explore personality frameworks together, they begin to shift how they interpret one another’s behavior. A conversation that previously might have led to frustration: “Why are they always asking so many questions?” now invites curiosity: “Ah, they lead with the ‘Wonder’ genius and need to ask big-picture questions before they act.”
Instead of assuming malice or carelessness, teams can explore how different workstyles, motivators, or energy zones are at play. This is the antidote to the fundamental attribution error: seeing behavior not as a moral failing or fixed trait, but as an expression of personality shaped by culture and context.
For example:
A colleague who needs quiet time to recharge isn’t disengaged; they’re likely an introvert rebalancing their energy to continue showing up as their best self (MBTI).
A team member who resists change might score high in conscientiousness and be trying to protect team stability (Big Five).
Someone who fixates on long-term goals might be driven by their strengths in Futuristic or Strategic thinking, while a colleague who is an Activator might be frustrated by this because they have a get-it-done attitude (CliftonStrengths).
Rather than jumping to conclusions, assessments encourage teammates to ask: What’s behind this behavior? What strengths, tendencies, or preferences might be guiding it?
Shared Language, Stronger Culture
One of the most powerful outcomes of integrating personality assessments into team development is the creation of a shared language. Instead of calling someone “too detail-obsessed,” you might say they’re leading with a strength in Executing (CliftonStrengths) or that their Galvanizing Genius (Working Genius) is pushing them to move faster than others.
This reframing helps teams:
Focus on assets, not deficits
Reduce interpersonal friction
Build empathy and patience
Align roles and responsibilities with natural strengths
Normalize different approaches to communication and collaboration
Make space for honest, generative conversations about workstyle
Build well-rounded teams
It also encourages teams to move away from one-size-fits-all expectations. Not everyone will ideate in the same way, manage their time the same way, or feel motivated by the same incentives. That’s not a problem to fix – it’s a strength to embrace.
A Word of Caution: Use, Don’t Stereotype
While assessments can reduce bias, they can also reinforce bias if used irresponsibly. Saying “She’s a Type 1, so of course she’s rigid” (Enneagram) or “He’s a low extravert, so he won’t be good with clients” (MBTI) flips the fundamental attribution error on its head – but still keeps us locked in assumptions.
The goal isn’t to pigeonhole people into static categories. Instead, it’s to offer a lens that helps teams ask better questions, notice blind spots, and flex more intentionally. In our work with teams, we always emphasize the importance of treating these tools as jumping-off points, not final answers.
Making it Real: Practical Uses in Team Settings
We’ve seen these tools unlock breakthroughs across industries and sectors. Here are a few ways we’ve helped clients incorporate personality frameworks into their team development work:
Retreat sessions where teams map their CliftonStrengths to uncover alignment and gaps
Leadership coaching using the Enneagram to explore reactivity, motivation, and growth edges
Strategic planning sessions that incorporate the Four Frames to encourage leaders to flex between structural and symbolic thinking
Conflict resolution workshops where MBTI results help surface and provide shared language for differences in communication and decision-making preferences
Each time, the outcome is the same: teams begin to give each other more grace as they better understand one another. They pause before jumping to conclusions. They see a difference as an asset rather than a liability.
Final Thoughts:
At the heart of all this is a simple reminder: people are complicated. Our actions are shaped by who we are and what we’re going through. Personality assessments help teams hold both truths at once. They name our default settings and preferences while reminding us that we’re capable of growing, adapting, working outside our comfort zone, and understanding others more deeply.
By pairing these tools with an awareness of the fundamental attribution error, teams can start to rewrite the stories they tell about each other, not with judgment, but with curiosity and care.
Are you ready to bring more clarity and connection to your team? At transform.forward, we help teams move beyond baseline assumptions and into deeper understanding using evidence-based assessments, tailored facilitation, and practical tools. Whether you’re planning a retreat, navigating change, or simply looking to strengthen your team’s dynamics, we’d love to support your work.
To learn more about the scholarship behind fundamental attribution error, check out these sources:
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. Wiley.
Jones, E. E., & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3(1), 1–24.
Jones, E. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (1971). The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. General Learning Press.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 173–220). Academic Press.
