Understanding Behaviours in the Workplace

Who is this course for?

If your work involves people, this is for you. It suits frontline and customer-facing staff who deal with the public, new and developing employees who want a fast grounding in workplace communication, and team leaders who want a shared language for behaviour across their team.

It is written in plain language for any New Zealand workplace, from the warehouse floor to the front desk, and every term is explained as it comes up.

What’s inside

Three short, hands-on lessons with real video examples, interactive practice and a downloadable action plan.

What behaviour profiling actually does for a team, and what it does not

Start with the uncomfortable part. The four-letter labels are the least reliable thing in this field. The Myers-Briggs Company, the publisher of the best known instrument in the world, states on its own facts page that "About 50 percent of people get the same four-letter or whole type on retest." The same page says plainly that the assessment "is not intended for use in selection of job candidates, nor for making internal decisions regarding job placement, selection for teams or task forces, or other similar activities."

So if the categories are that shaky, why would you put a whole team through a behaviour module?

The training works even when the labels do not

There is a controlled study that answers this directly. Varvel and colleagues split 193 engineering students into teams. Half received a one-hour type training session early in the semester, half received the same session at the very end. The trained group scored significantly higher on team performance, communication, interdependence, psychological safety and attitude. The finding that matters most is the one buried in the results: there were no statistically significant correlations between the teams' actual personality mix and any of those outcomes. The categories predicted nothing. The conversation did the work.

That is the honest case for this kind of training, and it is a better case than the one most providers make. You are not buying an accurate personality science. You are buying a shared vocabulary, delivered to everybody at roughly the same time.

Shared understanding is the part with real evidence behind it

DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus pooled 231 correlations from 65 independent studies and found team cognition, meaning the shared and organised understanding a team holds about its work and each other, predicted team performance at a corrected correlation of .38. It explained variance in performance over and above the team's behaviour and motivation.

Their second finding is the one worth designing a team session around. The stronger relationship was not for teams where everybody thought alike. It was for teams whose members held different, complementary knowledge and understood how the pieces fitted together. Similarity scored .32. Complementarity scored .44. The goal is not to get everyone on the same page. It is to get everyone able to describe how the pages differ.

Why teams reach for character when things go wrong

Most training on this topic recycles the idea that we all judge others by their character and ourselves by our circumstances. A meta-analysis of 173 studies covering 14,686 participants found that the general version of that claim does not hold up. It is a widely held but weakly supported belief.

What did survive is narrower and far more useful. The effect appears specifically for negative events, and it is driven by people reaching for internal explanations. Nothing goes wrong, nobody reads character into anything. A job is late, an email lands badly, a handover gets missed, and suddenly a colleague's behaviour becomes who they are rather than what happened. That is the exact moment this course is built for.

What this costs New Zealand employers

KPMG, commissioned by Te Kahui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission, put the cost of workplace bullying and harassment to New Zealand employers at $1.34 billion for the year to June 2022, with turnover and replacement the single largest component at $568 million. Umbrella Wellbeing surveyed 7,683 working New Zealanders across 29 organisations and found 26.2 percent did not agree they could bring up problems and tough issues in their team. Workers in the least psychologically safe teams had 8.3 times the odds of reporting bullying in the previous six months.

Where we would not oversell it

A 45 minute module does not make anyone a different person, and a behavioural label is not a diagnosis. Nor is accuracy irrelevant. A field study of 71 military teams found the accuracy of a team's shared understanding of its own task accounted for 19 percent of the variance in performance, so the content still has to be sound.

What it does do is give everybody the same words in the same week. Teams that stop and talk about how they worked, in a structured way, outperform teams that do not by around 25 percent across 46 studies. Most workplaces never create that conversation because nobody has handed them a way to start one that does not feel like a complaint. That is the job this module does, and it is why it is worth putting in front of a whole team rather than one manager.

Sources: The Myers-Briggs Company, MBTI facts. Varvel et al. (2004), Journal of Management in Engineering 20(4). DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus (2010), Journal of Applied Psychology 95(1). Malle (2006), Psychological Bulletin 132(6). Lim and Klein (2006), Journal of Organizational Behavior 27. Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013), Human Factors 55(2). KPMG for Te Kahui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission, Counting the Cost (May 2024). Umbrella Wellbeing, Mental safety at work in Aotearoa New Zealand (March 2024).

Common questions

How long does the module take?

Around 45 minutes across three short lessons. It is self-paced, so you can do it in one sitting or in short breaks.

Do I need any prior knowledge?

None at all. It is written in plain language for any workplace and explains every term as it goes.

Will I get a certificate?

Yes. You receive a certificate of completion once you finish the module and its knowledge checks.

Can I enrol my whole team?

Yes. Capability Solutions supports team and organisation-wide enrolments. Get in touch and we will set it up.

Why enrol a whole team rather than just the managers?

Because the benefit is the shared vocabulary, and a vocabulary only works if everyone has it. The controlled research on type training found the gains showed up in team communication, interdependence and psychological safety, all of which are properties of the group rather than the individual. One manager who has done the module and a team who has not is the least useful version of this.

Is behaviour profiling scientifically valid?

Not as a measuring instrument, and we would rather say so. The publisher of the best known type assessment reports that only about half of people get the same whole type when they retake it, and states it should not be used for selection or for picking teams. The evidence that does hold up is for what happens when a team builds a shared understanding of how its members differ, which predicts team performance at a corrected correlation of .38 across 65 studies. Treat the labels as a way into the conversation, never as a verdict on a person.

Will this stop conflict in our team?

No, and be wary of anything that promises it will. It will not fix a workload problem, a manager who punishes bad news, or a genuine disagreement about the work. What it reliably changes is the moment something goes wrong, which is precisely when the research shows people start reading a colleague's behaviour as character rather than circumstance. Giving a team the words to name a style difference at that moment is often enough to keep a small friction from turning into a formal complaint.