Into the mix: Personality processes and group dynamics in sport and exercise

Abstract

First paragraph: The importance of understanding, and attending to, the diverse personalities that comprise groups and teams has a rich history in social psychology. Kurt Lewin (1), who is generally regarded as the founding father of the field of ‘group dynamics’, noted that “in social research the experimenter has to take into consideration such factors as the personality of individual members” (p. 9). Just over three decades after Lewin’s seminal paper, another prominent group dynamics theorist, Marvin Shaw (2), similarly asserted that “personality characteristics of group members play an important role in determining their behavior in groups. The magnitude of the effect of any given characteristic is small but taken together the consequences for group processes are of major significance” (p. 208).