Effective Motive Profile Compositions for Cooperative Ad-Hoc Teams

Individuals working within a team have unique attributes which lead to the emergence of different team dynamics that could promote or hinder team performance. Implicit motivation is one such aspect that brings diversity. Research in the Psychology literature has identified three motive profiles that characterize individuals as achievement, affiliation, and as power motivated. In this work, we personify agents with these motive profiles and analyze their performance through a series of experiments using a prey–predator task domain. Throughout the experiments, we analyzed the productivity of teams with different motivation compositions (heterogeneous teams) and homogeneous teams with motive profiles created by perturbing the strengths of the three original motive profiles. Furthermore, we investigated how much an agent has to suppress its motivation to pick a more rational goal and quantified this inhibition by introducing a new metric named Perceived Tension. Our experiments concluded that when working collaboratively, having teams with a diverse motivation portfolio is beneficial. It was also evident that diversely motivated teams perform well across different test settings making such teams robust to different task difficulty levels. Furthermore, results showed that predominantly affiliation-motivated teams are less tensed when working on collaborative easy tasks, however their productivity is significantly poor. The framework introduced in this article can be used to understand the implications for workplaces and leaders when putting together organic teams to create a productive, healthy, and relaxed environment for their employees.