Organisation and Behaviour

Organisation and Behaviour

Introduction

Belbin's team role theory, originally described in his book Management Teams. Why They Succeed or Fail (Belbin, 1981), was developed from his work among managers and was formulated with their activities and needs in mind. As is now well known, Belbin proposed that for the optimal operation of a management team eight personality-related team roles needed to be fulfilled. He coined special names for them, completer finisher, chairman, company worker, monitor evaluator, resource investigator, plant, shaper and team worker, and suggested that some individuals possess a strong preference to operate in one or more of these roles.

Method

The aim of this study was to determine if differences in team-role composition effected team performance at a management game in consensus decision making. To achieve this a between-subjects design was used. The independent variable was the composition of the team, either mixed team roles or all shapers. There were seven dependent variables. The first was the total score for the assessment task. The remaining six were task process measures taken during completion of the game. Four of these measures were gathered in an attempt to determine whether certain behaviours, thought to be associated with effective team performance (Benne, 1948; cited in Adair, 1986), and proposed by Belbin to be associated with certain team roles, were more likely to occur in mixed teams where the team role they were associated with was represented, than in shaper teams where the team role was absent.

From 178 applicants, a total of 48 participants took part in the full study, of whom 33 were male and 15 were female. All were unpaid volunteers who were attending a management recruitment assessment day. They were all University graduates, whose ages ranged from 23 years to 45 years (mean= 28.41; SD= 5.65). Participants completed both the Belbin Team-Role Self Perception Inventory (BTRSPI) (Belbin, 1981), in order to assess their team role type, and the Critical Reasoning Verbal Evaluation (Bawtree et al., 1991), to assess an individual's verbal ability and logical evaluation of argument.

Task 1

Prior to participation, each person completed a Critical Reasoning Verbal Evaluation. Belbin found that the most significant predictor of poor team results was uniformly low scoring on the measures of mental ability. Therefore only those who achieved a score of at least average mental ability, as assessed by comparison to a composite group of graduates, were formed into groups for further assessment.

Each participant was asked to complete the BTRSPI to determine their primary team role on the basis of which those individuals whose profiles were consistent with those required for the study were formed into groups. A total of 12 groups of four people were created such that six teams were made up of four shapers, while the remaining six groups were mixed each containing one co-ordinator, one plant, one completer-finisher, and one team worker.

The composition of the mixed teams was based on Belbin's proposal that the eight team roles could be considered as four pairs: two team leaders, (shaper and co-ordinator), two creative ...