how members process information, such as a diverse set of knowledge, skills, and abilities to solve complex problems. Knowledge includes the facts and principles that apply to the domain of the team. Skills can be either basic or cross-functional. Basic skills include developed capabilities that assist in the learning or faster acquisition of knowledge. Cross-functional skills assist in the ability to carry out tasks that occur across jobs. Skills can also be categorized into technical skills (adequate ability to do a variety of jobs), human skills (the ability to interact with others), and conceptual skills (the ability to learn and use newly acquired knowledge). Abilities are long-lasting individual traits that impact performance. Abilities can include multiple dimensions ranging from scope (general vs. specific) to origin (innate vs. learned) to focus (task vs. social). Among the factors studied in relation to work team effectiveness, one consistent predictor is team members' collective cognitive ability. Diversity of abilities within a team offers the advantage of allowing members to learn from each other and to generate new ideas by combining or merging their qualifications. Stevens and Campion identified two broad skill areas: interpersonal KSAs and self-management KSAs, consisting of 14 specific KSA requirements for effective team work. The requirements include conflict resolution, collaborative problem solving, communication, goal setting and performance management, planning and task coordination. Personality Since the early 1990s, researchers have considered the effects of individual personality traits on team dynamics and performance to be an important team factor. The Big Five personality traits include extraversion (positive emotions, sociability and warmth), conscientiousness (competence order and self-discipline), agreeableness (trust, straightforwardness), openness to experience (new ideas, experiences and imagining), and neuroticism (anxiety, self-consciousness and sensibility). The last decade has witnessed renewed interest in personality that has been extended to teams as researchers have examined the impact of team personality composition on team effectiveness. In general, this research has found a link between aggregate team member personality and team performance. However, most of these studies have been conducted in laboratory settings using creativity as the performance criterion, meaning that they are disjunctive rather than additive tasks. Relatively little has been done to understand the relationship of personality to the performance of actual work teams completing production tasks that are additive. Another reason for the lack of cumulative knowledge in relating personality to actual work-team outcomes has been the lack of a generally accepted taxonomy of personality.