1.Why Belbin’s team roles.

First time we have met with Belbin’s team roles concept during our company’s workshops done few months age by Gdanska Fundacja Ksztalcenia Menadzerow (GFKM). This association was first one in Poland that in 1995 started to use this concept within practical business environment. Among various of different assessments and tests which were presented Belbin’s theory gave the impression of being very functional, especially in our current situation when we were promoted to leadership positions and we have to lead the teams of (at this time) anonymous for us people. At the same time this model is not to complicated so it can be used without any sophisticated analyses.

2.What is it Belbin’s team role theory?
During a period of over nine years, Meredith Belbin and his team of researchers based at Henley Management College, England, studied the behavior of managers from all over the world. Managers was observed during a training course provided by this college. Their different core personality traits, intellectual styles and behaviors were assessed during the exercise. As time progressed different clusters of behavior were identified as underlying the success of the teams.
First of all a team role was defined by Dr Meredith Belbin as: “A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way\" and nine general team roles were described:
§ Action oriented roles: Sharper, Implementer, and Completer Finisher
§ People-oriented roles: Coordinator, Teamworker and Resource Investigator
§ Cerebral roles: Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist

Table 1. Belbin’s nine team roles with description
Team Roles Descriptions Allowable Weakness
PLANT (PL) Creative, imaginative, unorthodox. Solves difficult problems. Ignores incidentals. Too pre-occupied to communicate effectively
CO-ORDINATOR (CO) Mature, confident, a good chairperson. Clarifies goals, promotes decision-making, delegates well Can often be seen as manipulative. Off loads personal work.
MONITOR EVALUATOR (ME) Sober, strategic and discerning. Sees all options. Judges accurately Lacks drive and ability to inspire others.
IMPLEMENTER (IMP) Disciplined, reliable, conservative and efficient. Turns ideas into practical actions. Somewhat inflexible. Slow to respond to new possibilities.
RESOURCE INVESTIGATOR (RI) Extrovert, enthusiastic, communicative. Explores opportunities. Develops contacts Over - optimistic. Loses interest once initial enthusiasm has passed.
SHAPER (SH) Challenging, dynamic, thrives on pressure. The drive and courage to overcome obstacles. Prone to provocation. Offends people\'s feelings
TEAMWORKER (TW) Co-operative, mild, perceptive and diplomatic. Listens, builds, averts friction. Indecisive in crunch situations
COMPLETER FINISHER (CF) Painstaking, conscientious, anxious. Searches out errors and omissions. Delivers on time Inclined to worry unduly. Reluctant to delegate.
SPECIALIST (SP) Single-minded, self-starting, dedicated. Provides knowledge and skills in rare supply. Contributes only on a narrow front. Dwells on technicalities.



What is very important there is no a better or worst team roles. Everything depends on complexity of tasks and on the different stage of team activity. Other words there is no a universal team role which can be applied for all kind of project. So the best situation appiers when all roles are balanced.
Table 3. Key stages of team activity and required team roles
Key Stages of Team activity Team Roles Relevant to Particular Stages
1.Indentifying needs (needs) Key figures at this stage are individuals with strong goal awareness. Shapers and coordinators mark their mark here
2.Finding ideas (ideas) Once and objective is set, the means of achieving it are required. Here plants and resource investigators have a crucial role to play
3.Formulating plans (plans) Two activities help ideas turn into plans.One weighing up the options the second marking good use of all relevant experience and knowledge to ensure a good decision . Monitor evaluators make especially good long-term planners and specialists have a key role to play at this stage
4.Making contacts (contact) People must be persuaded that an improvement is in prospect. Champions of the plans and cheer leaders must be found. However, to appease disturbed groups, a team worker is required
5.Establising the organization (organization) Plans need turning into procedures, methods and working practices to become routines. Implementers are the people required here. Getting people to fit the system is what coordinators are good at.
Following through (follow through) Too many assumptions are made that all will work out well in the end. Good follow-though benefits from the attentions of completers. Implementers, too, pull their weight in this area, for they pride themselves on being efficient in anything they undertake

3. Methodology of our research.
For identification of the people team role we can use two of the instruments designed by Belblin’s team:
§ Self-Perception Inventory (SPI) in this case questionnaire is completed by each team member. Each person describes his or her own role.
§ Observer Assessment Sheet (OA) in this case list of questions is full in by other ( at least for persons) member of the group. This time people describe role of other members.
(For you own benefit you can also use software named Interplace which provides on-line team role analyses includes SPI and OA instruments – for more details please go to Belbin Associates,UK website : www.belbin.com.)
For our study we have applied Self-Participation Inventory method. During the assessment we have used questionnaire provided and translated by GFKM. Unfortunately such a form is based on first Belbin’s researches and recognized only eight team roles . The participants of this analyze were 7 people (including authors of this paper), which work in one department. They are not a part of the same organization cell but time-to-time they are working together on the same projects that go across the department.

Table 2. Results of the Team Role assessment*.
Names** CO-ORDINATOR IMPLEMENTER SHAPER PLANT RESOURCE INVESTIGATOR MONITOR EVALUATOR TEAM WORKER COMPLETER FINISHER
Bolek 14 10 25 0 6 7 5 3
Krzysiek 11 17 16 2 6 12 6 0
Jolanta 2 11 10 6 2 4 12 23
Jan 10 15 28 2 2 8 3 2
Maria 2 11 8 8 2 10 4 25
Romek 12 2 6 6 14 2 18 10
Basia 2 5 7 12 4 18 6 16
Team (sum) 53 71 100 36 36 61 54 79
Team average 7.6 10.1 14.3 5.1 5.1 8.7 7.7 11.3
Team in % 10.8% 14.5% 20.4% 7.3% 7.3% 12.4% 11.0% 16.1%

Legend Least Preferred Roles Manageable Pref. Roles Preferred Roles High Preferred Roles
*scores for different team roles have got a different meaning, for instance 6 point for a Plant means: manageable preferred role but for Team Worker means: “only” least preferred role.
** to avoid a recognition of the persons names have been changed
Simply putting a number of people together and expecting them to work as a team is not enough.
Knowing people’s team roles we can have some reasonable expectations of how they are going to perform working as a team.
Analyzing the test results we can get some conlusion regarding the team we could built from it’s members.
As we see in our team we have 5 people whose high preferred roles are action oriented. Because Bolek has action oriented Sharper and people oriented Coordinator at high level. He could be a leader of the team. Nevertheless we can see potential conflict between Bolek and Jan because they both have Sharper as their Highly Preferred Role. At certain point they could compete instead of working as a team. If they can sacrifice their ambitions for the cause we should not worry about the leader. Sharper’s perception is a strong personality and if we look at the average score of our team we can get the conclusion that leading this team could be very challenging.
Krzysiek has the highest score as a Implementer and we believe that he turns team ideas into practical actions.
Jola and Maria have high preferred role as a Completer Finisher therefore we can expect form them sense of time urgency and we know they will look for an errors in the plan and things that might have been ommited.
Having five people action oriented we are almost sure that potential task for the team will be their main goal.
We don’t have anyone who’s high preferred role would be Plant however there is Basia who has that role as Preferred one. We believe that Plant role in a team is crutial because of his or her creativity and ability of solving difficult problems. However if we compare other scores in this field we know that other members will help find unconventional ideas or solutions.
Other Celebral role is Monitor Evaluator and over here with high preferred role we have Basia with her sober perception and ability to see various options.
Regarding people oriented roles we have Romek with his high score as a Resource Investigator. And he would be the only one because other people have this role as a least preferred one.
Romek is also Team Worker so we can notice that he would be resposible for buildig good atmosphere in that team.
According to Belbin team role, balance is when all team roles are fully represented at or above natural role level.
We can assume that performace of our team with all roles represented above natural level among members will be better then performance of others team whitout it.















Chart 1. Percentage of Team Roles

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