Belbin's Team Roles

Belbin's Team Roles is effective way to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of a team. Helps the team to understand ways in which it could improve performance. Belbin’s Team Roles describe a pattern of behavior that characterizes one person’s behavior in relationship to another in facilitating the progress of a team. The value of Belbin’s Team Roles theory lies in enabling an individual or team to benefit from self-knowledge and adjust according to the demands being made by the external situation.

During a period of over nine years, Meredith Belbin and his team of researchers based at Henley Management College, England, studied the behavior of managers from all over the world. Managers taking part in the study were given a battery of psychometric tests and put into teams of varying composition, while they were engaged in a complex management exercise. Their different core personality traits, intellectual styles and behaviors were assessed during the exercise. As time progressed different clusters of behavior were identified as underlying the success of the teams. These successful clusters of behavior were then given names. Hence the emergence of nine team roles in Belbin’s Team Roles.

These are:

• Action-Oriented Roles - Shaper, Implementer, and Completer Finisher
• People-Oriented Roles - Co-ordinator, Team-worker and Resource Investigator
• Cerebral Roles - Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist

Uses of the Belbin's Team Roles: It should always be remembered that the tool helps to describe an individual's 'preferred' team roles and is designed to indicate how you would ideally operate in a team environment. Strength in one team role is often at the expense of what might be seen as a weakness in another context.

In Belbin’s Team Roles an ideal team should ideally have a healthy balance of all 9 team roles. Strong teams normally have a strong coordinator, a plant, a monitor evaluator and one or more implementers, team workers, resource investigators or completer finishers. A shaper should be an alternative to a coordinator rather than having both. In practice, the ideal is rarely the case, and it can be beneficial for a team to know which of the team roles are either over represented or absent and to understand individual's secondary roles.

Belbin's Team Roles tend to develop and mature and may change with experience and conscious attention. If a role is absent from the team, and then it is often filled by someone who has not recognized this role as a dominant one. The team should share their team roles to increase understanding and enable mutual expectations to be met.

The Belbin's Team Roles is a robust and highly effective concept on teamwork that is the product of many years of research. British psychologist Dr Meredith Belbin has worked to achieve a coherent and accurate system that explains individual behavior and its influence on team success. These behavioral patterns are called "Team Roles" and these nine roles cover the types of individual behavior at work in a team.

• Plant (PL): Advancing new ideas and strategies with special attention to major issues and looking for possible breaks in approach to the problem that the group is confronting.
• Resource Investigator (RI): Exploring and reporting on ideas, developments and resources outside the group, creating external contacts that may be useful to the team and conducting negotiations.
• Co-ordinator (CO): Controlling the way in which the team moves forward towards the group objectives by making the best use of team resources; recognizing where the team's strengths and weaknesses lie and ensuring the best use is made of each member potential.
• Shaper (SH): Shaping the way in which the team effort is applied, directing attention generally to the setting of objectives and priorities and seeking to impose some shape or pattern on group discussion and on the outcome of group activities.
• Monitor Evaluator (ME): Analyzing problems, evaluating ideas and suggestions so that the team is better placed to take balanced decisions.
• Team Worker (TW): Supporting members in their strengths; e.g. Building on suggestions, underpinning members in their shortcomings, improving communications between members and fostering team spirit generally.
• Implementer (IMP): Turning concepts and ideas into practical working procedures; carrying out agreed plans systematically and efficiently.
• Completer Finisher (CF): Ensuring the team is protected as far as possible from mistakes of both commission and omission; actively searching for aspects of work that need a more than usual degree of attention; and maintaining a sense of urgency within the team.
• Specialist (SP): Feeding technical information into the group. Translating from general into technical terms. Contributing a professional viewpoint on the subject under discussion.
• Renowned corporate psychologist Dr David Marriott (a colleague of Belbin and an expert on his work) is available for detailed team role profiling and reporting for corporate teams and managers.