Introduction: When a team performs optimally, each member has clear responsibilities, and all roles necessary to achieve the team’s goals are fully performed. However, teams often fall short due to gaps in roles or conflicts between members. Understanding how people behave in teams can help address these challenges.
Dr. Meredith Belbin’s Team Roles Model: Belbin’s research identified nine distinct roles that individuals tend to assume in teams, categorized into three groups: Action-Oriented, People-Oriented, and Thought-Oriented. These roles help balance the team and ensure that diverse strengths are represented. Belbin’s model also highlights that each role comes with its own set of “allowable” weaknesses.
The Nine Team Roles:
1. Action-Oriented Roles:
- Shaper (SH):
- Strengths: Challenges the team, dynamic, extroverted, stimulates others.
- Weaknesses: Can be argumentative and may offend others’ feelings.
- Implementer (IMP):
- Strengths: Turns ideas into practical actions, organized, reliable.
- Weaknesses: Resistant to change and may be inflexible.
- Completer-Finisher (CF):
- Strengths: Ensures thorough completion, attentive to details, meets deadlines.
- Weaknesses: May worry unnecessarily and struggles with delegation.
2. People-Oriented Roles:
- Coordinator (CO):
- Strengths: Acts as a chairperson, delegates effectively, listens well.
- Weaknesses: Can delegate too much personal responsibility, possibly manipulative.
- Team Worker (TW):
- Strengths: Supports team cohesion, diplomatic, builds strong teams.
- Weaknesses: Tends to be indecisive, avoids commitment in discussions.
- Resource Investigator (RI):
- Strengths: Explores external opportunities, enthusiastic, develops contacts.
- Weaknesses: Can lose enthusiasm quickly, overly optimistic.
3. Thought-Oriented Roles:
- Plant (PL):
- Strengths: Creative and innovative, introduces new ideas.
- Weaknesses: Can be impractical, poor communicator, struggles with constraints.
- Monitor-Evaluator (ME):
- Strengths: Analyzes and evaluates ideas objectively, strategic thinker.
- Weaknesses: May appear detached, not a motivator, reactive rather than proactive.
- Specialist (SP):
- Strengths: Provides expert knowledge and skills.
- Weaknesses: Focuses too much on technicalities, lacks the bigger picture.
Using Belbin’s Team Roles to Build Balanced Teams:
- Teams become unbalanced when members share similar strengths or weaknesses. Understanding team members’ roles can help balance the team, ensuring all necessary strengths are covered and weaknesses are managed.
- The model is often used by team leaders to ensure role diversity and improve team collaboration.
- Teams with mixed roles tend to perform better than those dominated by one or a few roles.
How to Apply Belbin’s Model:
- Identify Roles: Assess the roles of each team member to see which are over- or underrepresented.
- Balance the Team: Ensure that all roles are adequately covered, promoting strengths and addressing weaknesses.
- Promote Awareness: Encourage team members to understand their own strengths and weaknesses and how they interact with others.
- Action Points: After identifying roles, teams should establish key action points for improving collaboration.
Key Points to Remember:
- Belbin’s model is a useful tool for identifying individual strengths and weaknesses within a team.
- Each role has its importance, and there is no “best” role. The key is to balance the team by combining different roles.
- Team behavior can change depending on the context or project, so the model should be used as a guide rather than a strict framework.
Conclusion: Belbin’s Team Roles model provides insight into the dynamics of teamwork, helping teams become more balanced and productive. By understanding the roles that each member plays, team leaders can improve overall team performance and conflict resolution.
