Teams are widely recognized as the basic building blocks of most modernday organizations (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008). Team-based designs enable organizations to quickly align their human resources with the multitude of changing work demands and competitive pressures. Enhancing team effectiveness offers a powerful means by which organizations can gain and maintain competitive advantage. Team effectiveness can be driven by a number of factors such as a supportive organizational environment, team-oriented external leadership, design features, dynamic processes and emergent states, and a host of other variables (Mathieu et al., 2008). However, research and practice have suggested that the best teams are well designed up-front. Teams that have an optimal mix of members’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) are better positioned to work well together and to perform effectively than are teams composed of a less-optimal combination of members (Bell, 2007; Ilgen, 1999). In short, team composition serves as the foundation upon which other team factors are built, and represents a key enabling feature of teams. Moreover, understanding how a team is “composed” can provide insights for targeted team development activities.
Numerous characteristics have been used to index team composition, including personality, functional expertise, competencies, goal orientations, teamwork orientations, and a host of other attributes (Klimoski & Zukin, 1999; Mathieu, Tannenbaum, Donsbach, & Alliger, 2014). Importantly, these individual attributes motivate and enable individuals to occupy different team roles (Stewart, Fulmer, & Barrick, 2005). A role is generally defined as a cluster of related and goal-directed behaviors taken on by a person within a specific situation (Stewart, Manz, & Sims, 1999). Teams rely on different members to fulfill different critical needs such as organizing work, maintaining group harmony, and aligning their efforts with those of others in an organization (Aritzeta, Swailes, & Senior, 2007; Stewart et al., 2005). Accordingly, both research and practice will benefit from a greater understanding of individual differences that are associated with team role fulfillment, and from tools to assess those differences.
Team Role Theories
Roles are often considered to be one of the fundamental and defining features of both organizations (Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1991; Sluss, van Dick, & Thompson, 2011) and teams (Hackman, 1990). Aritzeta et al. (2007) noted that there are two heritages in the team role literature. One approach, which we could term role as position, equates roles with expected behavior associated with the particular position that a team member occupies (e.g., Katz & Kahn, 1978). Essentially, this view focuses on the characteristics and demands of jobs and how they give rise to certain expected role behaviors of occupants. A second approach, “role as person,” suggests that roles can be defined as a combination of the values, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals who occupy particular locations in a social network. From this perspective, roles emerge from a combination of members’ natural inclinations or preferences, as well as the social-psychological dynamics of the group (Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1991). We adopt this latter approach because we are interested in developing indices of individual differences that may predispose people to fulfill particular roles in teams.
(Source: The Official Guide to Belbin Team Roles from Belbin HQ - What is Belbin? , 2014)
The interest in team roles gained momentum in the 1980s with the publication of Belbin’s (1981) work on successful management teams. Belbin’s (1981) theory advanced eight distinct team role types:
(a) idea generator,
(b) resource investigator,
(c) chairman,
(d) shaper,
(e) monitor evaluator,
(f) team worker,
(g) company worker, and
(h) completer–finisher.
(Source: Smartsheet Contributor Becky Simon August 7, 2017)
In later editions, he changed various names (i.e., chairman to coordinator, company worker to implementer) and introduced a new role called specialist. Belbin (1981, 1993) examined management teams playing executive simulations (e.g., computerized management and business exercises) during training courses where team performance was measured in terms of winning or losing.
In addition to the possible gender basis, the lack of consistent results across studies may be related to the type of team being assessed and the original sample and context. Belbin’s work focused extensively on management teams, and while certainly of interest, others have argued that top management teams are qualitatively different from other types of teams (Hollenbeck, Beersma, & Schouten, 2012).
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