Hire the Undervalued Neurotic, You’ll be Happy You Did
News flash! Neurotics are conscientious team members and should be appreciated and used more effectively in organizations. Or so say Corinne Bendersky, an associate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and Neha Parikh Shah, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School, in The Downfall of Extraverts and the Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process of Status Allocation in Task Groups.
The study uses a different polarity than one might expect. It looks not as introverts versus extroverts but “neurotics” versus extroverts. For instance, “Implicit theories of leadership tend to associate positive status value with assertiveness and negative status value to anxiety, which is a facet of neuroticism” Frankly, I don’t see this being anywhere near as tidy a distinction as Bendersky and Shan. McKinsey made a point of hiring people who were anxious but client-presentable, which meant they had to be extraverted or at least able to fake it credibly.
Nevertheless, the paper makes some interesting observations when you do have people who fit neatly into those categories. The extroverts are preferred, both by employers (look at how candidates for many jobs are virtually required to stress how they are upbeat, can do, team oriented, etc.) and in their initial assessment by team members. In a write-up of the article, Susan Adams at Forbes reminds us of widely-held beliefs:
Most leaders are attracted to the guy or woman who seems confident and outgoing, unafraid in any situation or facing any challenge. They expect an extrovert to infuse any team with energy, to push ahead on projects and to motivate colleagues to do their best work. Meantime they have low expectations of anyone who appears neurotic, who seems withdrawn and too anxious to live up to their potential. Leaders expect neurotic employees to contribute little and to drag down colleagues’ morale.
The requirement to be chipper and upbeat is so fetishized that accusing someone of “negativity” is a cheap but usually effective way to shut them up. In keeping, when teams of MBAs were formed in one of the experiments conducted in the study, the extroverted folk were initially given high ranking by their peers and the quieter, nebishy types, low ones.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/04/hire-the-undervalued-neurotic-youll-be-happy-you-did.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Consider how confidently I posted my points 
Yeah, maybe I was shooting from the hip there.
I can really speak only from my personal experience when it comes to large meetings. I hate them, because I always feel like they are keeping me from getting work done. Then again, I would probably fall into the "specialist" category. I would always avoid a position in top management if I had a choice, because I would feel like I am far removed from where the action is happening.
I think my perspective on teamwork is not that it is bad but that the current trend is to over-emphasize it. I was sent to do soft skills courses once and there we had to do everything in teams. In the end we usually did the best when we figured out how a task could be "parallelized", assigning each person the task that they are best at. I read somewhere that teams are best at doing tasks that resemble solving a cross-work puzzle whereas individuals are best at solving tasks that resemble designing a cross-word puzzle. My point being: Some tasks cannot be broken into small pieces and people trying to do them together will always be in each others way. Best thing to do is just assign the task to the individual who has the most of that particular skill. From the seminar it would seem like, no, a team it should always be. And always start with a brainstorming session where people are allowed to throw out crazy ideas, how task unrelated they may be. I thought that this was not a sound strategy.
Now with regards to decisions being best made when the mood is worst, I think there was a study on that. Coincidentally I read about that on cracked.com, which sometimes is not a perfect source but sometimes they have good stuff on there. Basically there was some test done which measured problem-solving skills in individuals and the ones who reported being in a bad mood did better. Maybe there is some causation-correlation mixup involved too, I have no clue.
