While getting on the same page is important, intellectual blind spots are a huge problem for most organizations. People who think too similarly tend to miss the same sorts of things, and it's absolutely crucial to the success of any serious project that you have diversity in terms of biases and opinions.
To make a trivial example, if you're an optimistic person and you hire all optimists, you'll ignore some potential problems. If you hire all pessimists, you'll ignore some potential long-shot opportunities you should pursue. If you hire all detail people, you'll miss out on the big picture. If you hire all big picture people, you'll miss out on the details.
People tend to hire people they feel comfortable with and get along with, which tends to mean people that think like them and agree with them. So when assembling a team, getting a diversity of opinions and biases is something you really need to take seriously. You need people who can work together and be civil and come to agreements and who like working with each other, but you really do need to have a mix of people who think differently.
I have no real data on the subject, but my mother has done organizational development work using the MBTI, so I've heard plenty of anecdotal stories around the types of dysfunctions that develop at organizations that have too much of a bias in one direction.
To make a trivial example, if you're an optimistic person and you hire all optimists, you'll ignore some potential problems. If you hire all pessimists, you'll ignore some potential long-shot opportunities you should pursue. If you hire all detail people, you'll miss out on the big picture. If you hire all big picture people, you'll miss out on the details.
People tend to hire people they feel comfortable with and get along with, which tends to mean people that think like them and agree with them. So when assembling a team, getting a diversity of opinions and biases is something you really need to take seriously. You need people who can work together and be civil and come to agreements and who like working with each other, but you really do need to have a mix of people who think differently.
I have no real data on the subject, but my mother has done organizational development work using the MBTI, so I've heard plenty of anecdotal stories around the types of dysfunctions that develop at organizations that have too much of a bias in one direction.