Developing your own team working skills

Meredith Belbin developed his team role inventory in the 1970s following research he did on business games in executive courses at Henley Management College (now part of the University of Reading, UK). He first created a self-assessment tool that identified eight team roles, and through later research developed this to include nine roles. The focus of his team role theory is that team effectiveness is derived from a balance of abilities within a team. The nine roles he identified are: coordinator, plant, implementer, monitor evaluator, shaper, team-worker, resource investigator, completer finisher and specialist. You will find out more about each of these roles in the reading you will study in Activity 7.

Throughout the years, Belbin has engaged in scholarly debate about his inventory, and there have been criticisms regarding its reliability and validity (Fincham and Rhodes, 2005). He has since expanded the process by which team role assessment is conducted, including feedback from critics.

Despite the controversy over its assessment process, Belbin’s inventory has become one of the most popular assessment tools in contemporary management practice. Belbin runs a successful consultancy out of Cambridge, UK with his son and colleagues, and more information on team roles and a scored inventory (for a fee) is available through the Belbin website [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

In Activity 6 you will read more about Belbin’s team roles and use these to do some thinking about the team roles you perform in your day-to-day work. You will then read an article that critiques the model and develop some critical thinking of your own using Belbin’s model.