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Dispositional Characteristics: An Important Dimension to Inclusive Learner-Centered Organizations
Type of Session
Individual Paper Presentation
Abstract
The preparation of today’s students to meet the future intellectual and workforce demands is an ongoing challenge for higher education. Critical to meeting this challenge is creating an inclusive learner-centered organization that values the perspectives and contributions of all people. Experiencing models of inclusion is critical for today’s students to address the many “wicked problems” facing society. Wicked problems involve complex systems that are characterized by competing values, multilevel social interactions, difficult to predict cause and effect relationships, and high degrees of uncertainty. To address these wicked problems requires effective interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams composed of many disciplines. Studies of teams indicate that team members struggle to achieve knowledge integration across disciplines. Part of the struggle with integration is recognizing that there are not only differences in conceptual understanding, but there are also differences in the dispositional characteristics of team members. A person’s disposition involve beliefs, feelings and values (motivational drivers) that determine a person's characteristic actions and reactions (i.e. behaviors) to act in certain ways. We use the concept of dispositional distance© to describe the differences in the dispositional characteristics of team members. There are inherent dispositional distances between all people on teams including professors and students in the classroom. The analysis of dispositional assessment data have informed us about the diversity in the behavioral styles and motivational drivers of students that influence their individual success as well as their ability to work in collaborative teams. Output from the assessment instruments provides verbal and visual models that reveals significant diversity about the how, why, and what of individual performance. Analysis of these data have identified certain mixtures of behavioral styles and motivational drivers that may be problematic to group work as well as individual academic success.