Does it matter who teaches you? A study on the relevance of matching students' and teachers' personalities

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether student-teacher personality (mis)match has an impact on student's understanding of the subject matter and learning experience. We begin by hypothesizing that it does matter who teaches you and, based on our personal teaching experience to start with, assume that when students' and teachers' personalities match, students learn more effectively and, therefore, have a better learning experience. We empirically test our assumption among 260 undergraduate business students of 16 different nationalities and 27 teachers in one of the business schools in Europe. We first determine the students' and the teachers' personality type as well as their nationality and then ask students to self-report on their understanding of 27 subjects in their curriculum. Based on descriptive statistics, results show that a (mis)match between the teacher's and the student's personality has no positive or negative impact on student's learning outcome. In other words, it does not matter who teaches you. Our contribution lies in the contrasting results to most empirical evidence on this topic but also a different student cohort in our study. This paper offers possible insight into why we obtained such results, discusses limitations and areas of further research.