Are you a team player? Two different questions in one

Job ads ask for "a team player" as if it were one trait. It is at least two. Some people are reliable teammates who still do their best thinking alone. Others love the buzz of a group and are less careful about pulling their weight in it. The Team Player Test gives you a separate score for each, so you can see which one you are.

What the two scores measure

Teamwork comes from a public-domain scale in the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), written for the VIA classification of character strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004; the IPIP items are described by Goldberg and colleagues, 2006). Its nine items ask about loyalty and showing up: not missing group meetings, supporting your teammates, respecting decisions the group has made. Five of the nine are worded the other way round, for example "I prefer to do everything alone", so agreeing with every statement does not push the score up.

Preference for joint work comes from six items we wrote ourselves. They ask what you would choose if the choice were yours: whether you get your best ideas by talking a problem through, whether a shared goal motivates you more than a private one, whether coordinating with other people slows you down. Nobody has checked these six items against other measures yet, so read this score as a description of your preferences. It has no known accuracy.

Four ways the scores combine

• High on both. You like working with people and you are dependable in a group. Group projects and close-knit teams tend to suit you.
• High teamwork, low preference. You do your share and back the group's decisions, but you would rather split the work and do your part on your own. Many specialists land here, and good teams need them.
• Low teamwork, high preference. You enjoy the energy of a group, but the routine side of membership gets less of your attention: turning up, following through on what the group agreed. That side is the easier one to change once you have noticed it.
• Low on both. Solo work suits you. Look for roles with clear individual ownership and fewer meetings, and say so in interviews instead of claiming the opposite.

What the test cannot tell you

It is a self-report. It records how you see yourself, and the people you work with may see it differently. If the result surprises you, ask one of them.

It also says nothing about the part you play once you are in a team. The team role test sorts you into one of five roles (leader, innovator, executor, harmonizer or analyst), and the communication style test shows how you talk and listen in a group. For the wider picture of how different personalities work together, read personality and teamwork.

Before you start

Answer for how you work now, not for how you think a good colleague should work. The test has 15 statements and takes about four minutes. The result appears straight away, with no account needed.