Team Roles

Team Roles

Many projects within organisations require that people work together to accomplish a common goal; therefore, teamwork is an important factor in most organisations and increasingly so.

Effective collaborative skills are necessary to work well in a team environment. Many businesses attempt to enhance their employees' collaborative efforts through workshops and cross-training to help people effectively work together and accomplish shared goals.

“The old structures are being reformed. As organisations seek to become more flexible in the face of rapid environmental change and more responsive to the needs of customers, they are experimenting with new, team-based structures” (Jackson & Ruderman, 1996).

A 2003 national representative survey, HOW-FAIR, revealed that Americans think that 'being a team player' was the most important factor in getting ahead in the workplace. This was ranked higher than several other factors, including 'merit and performance', 'leadership skills', 'intelligence', 'making money for the organisation' and 'long hours'.

As in sport, it is important that not everybody in a team has the same position, but an effective team works by individuals sticking to their job or 'role' and not trying to do someone elses.

This thinking resulted in much research as to what roles were necessary for a team to operate at optimum efficiency and a well-used and understood model of team roles was devised by Dr. Raymond Meredith Belbin.

Belbin's Team Roles

While Belbin's model has become world famous and is taught as a standard part of much management training, there are possible criticisms of both the model itself and the way it is sometimes used.

The research which identified these roles was conducted by devising exercises based on a game designed to simulate business decision-making with an emphasis on generating profit in a fictitious company, and a version of Monopoly specially adapted to remove the chance elements and enable groups to play in teams against other teams.

While Belbin draws on examples from real organisations, the development of the model is based on the behaviour of subjects in the artificial environment of a business school exercise.

Some people teach that all eight/nine roles must be present for a team to function well. Belbin himself acknowledges that some teams consisting of one Shaper and a group of "yes" men perform well, especially where predictability was high. His book identifies a number of combinations that performed well in the exercises, especially where the teams were aware of "missing" roles within their ranks.

Some people attempt to match Belbin's roles with Carl Jung's eight personality types, or another personality type classification. Belbin, however, is at pains to point out that the team roles are not personality types. He regards them as clusters of characteristics, of which psychological preference is but one dimension.

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