AP51804

Researchers at the Knowledge Media Research Center (KMRC) in Tübingen and at Universitaet Tübingen recently conducted an online study as a follow-up to Adam Grant’s, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, version of personality measurement. According to Grant, there are three main styles of interaction: the Givers, the Matchers, and the Takers. What this recent study suggests is that these styles can be “applied to organizational knowledge sharing” (Universitaet Tübingen). Prof. Dr. Sonja Utz, a professor at the University of Tübingen, along with her colleagues Nicole Muscanell and Dr. Anja Göritz, examined how this Grant’s method relates to sharing by studying over 1200 workers. These women also used a personality assessment that classified people as being either a prosocial, an individualist, or a competitor (Utz, Muscanell, Gӧritz). For the experiment, participants took different types of personality assessments, so that they could be properly classified. Then two weeks later, they gave each participant a fixed amount of money, and the participants were to decide whether to keep their money for themselves or to put it all into the group’s pool, where the money would then be doubled and split equally among them. What the researchers discovered was that those who were givers tended to be more selfless than those classified as takers. Compared to the traditional scale of personality measurement, Professor Grant’s method was better at predicting behaviors two weeks later. The results showed that givers were more likely to give up all the information and resources they had, while takers would keep both the money and information to themselves (Utz, Muscanell, Gӧritz). While this information would be very useful to employers, the experiment has many flaws. It is possible that participants were subject to groupthink and group polarization, both of which could have influenced their decision-making processes (Wood, 451).
 * Science Summary **

Sonja Utz, Nicole Muscanell, Anja S. Göritz. **Give, match, or take: A new personality construct predicts resource and information sharing**. //Personality and Individual Differences//, 2014; 70: 11 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.06.011
 * References:**

Wood, Samuel E., Ellen R. Green. Wood, and Denise Roberts. Boyd. //Mastering the World of Psychology//. Fourth ed. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2011. Print.

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