Optimising Congenial Teams

Effective teams are crucial for organisations, especially in environments that require teams to be constantly created and dismantled, such as software development, scientific experiments, crowd-sourcing, or the classroom. One of the key factors influencing team performance is the personality of team members. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm to partition a group of individuals into gender and psychologically-balanced problem-solving teams. With this purpose, we got inspiration from Wildes post-Jungian theory for team formation. Personality traits of people are obtained through a quantitative transformation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The algorithm uses a greedy technique to balance the psychological traits of the members of teams so that each team gets the full range of problem-solving capabilities. Finally, we present some preliminary empirical results comparing the quality of the teams obtained by our algorithm and those proposed by a teacher.