This group of roles provides the innovative, analytical, and expert aspects of the team’s operations. We will dedicate the following lines to the characteristics of each of the team roles, divided by Belbin into three groups: Furthermore, each role possesses certain drawbacks. Each role has certain characteristics that are beneficial to the operations of the team.

He translated those clusters into nine team roles:Īccording to Belbin, the most performant teams are those with the optimal distribution of nine team roles across their ranks. Belbin’s team rolesīased on his research, Belbin has identified nine distinct clusters of behavior (the initial number was eight, expanded to nine in a later revision of his research). team roles.Īccording to Belbin, a team role is “ a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.” In other words, team roles represent tasks and functions that team members perform to self-manage the team’s activities. It was not the intellect that was the driver of the highest performances, but rather the right balance of different behaviors - i.e. Belbin initially presumed that high-intellect teams would perform at the highest level, but the results have shown otherwise. These inquiries have yielded a number of different models, theories, and definitions of team roles, but none have been as impactful and influential as the work of English researcher and management consultant Raymond Meredith Belbin.īelbin’s teachings, now most commonly known as the “Belbin Team Inventory”, have been rooted in a 10-year research on the performance of a large number of teams. From the second half of the 20 th century, researchers have begun looking into the impact of individual psychological characteristics of employees on the success of the group as a whole. The increasing post-WWII industrialization has required a new perspective on the changing nature of the workforce. What if my team has less than nine people?.

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