The structure of Belbin's team roles

Abstract

Belbin's original management team model requires the presence of eight individuals, each of whom shows a facility for a particular role. Because many teams in industry have fewer than eight members, the issue of secondary team roles is important. A study was undertaken of data collected from UK managers (N = 1796) which showed that team roles fall into two general categories and which we labelled ‘task’ and ‘relationship’. These categories, which reveal the likely secondary team role for any given individual, were also shown to predict the degree of harmony and productiveness of dyads within a given team.

A balanced team generating model

“…However there are several constraints that have to be fulfilled. It is found (Fisher et al, 1998) that there exist pairs of role-character combinations of one person that will result in less team performance if the scores are near to each other. On the other hand some role pair combinations of two different people can offer complementary ways of creating coherence in team functioning.…”

“…In the figure the coordinator and implementer roles are shown at high scores for person P 1 . The coordinator and implementer role interact harmonious but not productive according to Fisher et al (1998).…”

“…In Table 5 an overall overview of the existing ideas is given based on the paper of Fisher et al (1998). The above implies that in an ideal situation only persons with harmonious and productively role pairs are assigned to a team.…”

“…In Fisher et al (1998) the idea of ''relation orientated'' and ''task orientated'' roles is introduced. They roughly divide the eight team roles into two subsets.…”

“…For the sake of completeness we mention that one could argue that the results shown in Table 5 can be questioned. Studying Belbin (1993, Chapter 5) and Fisher et al (1998) one could detect inconsistencies in definition. This especially accounts for the notion of relation and task type of roles.…”