HIGH PERFORMANCE

LEADERSHIP

--BY HEENA DAS.

ROLL-15
Class-B

THANKS TO –
MR. DESPANDE
BELBIN’S TEAM ROLES
HOW & WHY THERE WAS A CREATION
OF BELBINS THEORY:
1. Dr. Meredith Belbin first began studying teams at Henley Management College
in the 1970s.
2. Over a period of ten years, Belbin carried out extended observational research
to determine which factors influenced team failure or success.
3. A management game was designed to reproduce work life. It contained all the
principal variables that typify the problems of decision-making in a business
environment. The experiment was designed along scientific lines with careful
measurement at each stage.
4. Those participating were invited to take a battery of psychometric tests and
teams were assembled on the basis of test scores. At first, Belbin hypothesised
that high-intellect teams would succeed where lower intellect teams would not.
5. However, the outcome of this research was that certain teams, predicted to be
excellent based on intellect, failed to fulfil their potential.
6. In fact, it became apparent by looking at the various combinations that it was
not intellect, but balance, which enabled a team to succeed.
7. The most successful companies tended to be those with a mix of different
people, i.e. those with a range of different behaviours.
 FACTS ABOUT THE THEORY
 Dr. Meredith Belbin is well known for his team roles
concept.
 The team roles identified by Belbin are based on certain
patterns of behaviour that people exhibit within teams.
 These patterns of behaviour can potentially have an
impact on the performance of the team.
 The basic premise of the Belbin team roles theory is quite
simple.
 When individuals become aware of their own

strength

abilities

Understand the role play

within a team, it helps them to deal

better with the demands of the team
environment.
APPLICATION AND USE
 Data from the Belbin Team Inventory can also be
amalgamated and interpreted to assess how effectively
1) a team is likely to work together,

2) including selecting the best candidate to fulfil each

role,
3) identifying gaps and overlaps in the Team Role
distribution
which might have an impact on a team's success.
 The Belbin Team Inventory can also be used in
conjunction with the Belbin Job Requirements Inventory
to assess a candidate's behavioural performance in a
particular job.
A TEAM ROLE CAME TO BE DEFINED AS:

“A TENDENCY TO BEHAVE, CONTRIBUTE AND

INTERRELATE WITH OTHERS IN A PARTICULAR
WAY.”

IT WAS FOUND THAT DIFFERENT INDIVIDUALS

DISPLAYED DIFFERENT TEAM ROLES TO
VARYING DEGREES.

THE 9 TEAM ROLES ARE USUALLY FURTHER

CLASSIFIED INTO:- Action
oriented

Celebral
oriented

People
oriented
 Cerebral/Intellectual Role:

IMPL
EMEN
TER
Co-
ordin
ator

SHA
PER Tea
mwo

ACTION People Skills

rker

ORIENTED
COMP

Oriented
LETE Resou
R rce
Investi
gator

Role

Pla
nter

monit
or/eva
luator

CEREBRAL
ROLE
Spec
ialist
 PLANT
 The first Team Role to be identified was the “Plant”. The
role was so-called because one such individual was
“planted” in each team. They tended to be highly creative
and good at solving problems in unconventional ways.
 Plants are creative, unorthodox and a generator of ideas. If
an innovative solution to a problem is needed, a Plant is a
good person to ask. A good Plant will be bright and free-
thinking. Plants can tend to ignore incidentals and refrain
from getting bogged down in detail.
 Multiple Plants in a team can lead to conflict, as many
ideas are generated without sufficient discernment or the
impetus to follow the ideas through to action.
MONITOR EVALUATOR
 Monitor Evaluators are fair and logical observers and
judges of what is going on in the team.
 Since they are good at detaching themselves from bias,
they are often the ones to see all available options with
the greatest clarity and impartiality.
 They take a broad view when problem-solving, and by
moving slowly and analytically, will almost always come
to the right decision.
 However, they can become very critical, damping
enthusiasm for anything without logical grounds, and
they have a hard time inspiring themselves or others to
be passionate about their work.
CO-ORDINATORS
 Co-ordinators were needed to focus on the team’s objectives,
draw out team members and delegate work appropriately.
 The co-ordinator’s strength lies in enabling and facilitating
interaction and decision making.
 A Co-ordinator is a likely candidate for the chairperson of a team,
since they have a talent for stepping back to see the big picture.
 Co-ordinators are confident, stable and mature and because they
recognise abilities in others, they are very good at delegating tasks
to the right person for the job.
 The Co-ordinator clarifies decisions, helping everyone else focus
on their tasks.
 Coordinators are sometimes perceived to be manipulative, and
will tend to delegate all work, leaving nothing but the delegating
for them to do.
RESOURCE INVESTIGATOR
 When the team was at risk of becoming isolated and inwardly-
focused, Resource Investigators provided inside knowledge on
the opposition and made sure that the team’s idea would carry to
the world outside the team.
 The Resource Investigator gives a team a rush of enthusiasm at
the start of the project by vigorously pursuing contacts and
opportunities.
 He or she is focused outside the team, and has a finger firmly on
the pulse of the outside world.
 Where a Plant creates new ideas, a Resource Investigator will
quite happily appropriate them from other companies or people.
 A good Resource Investigator is a maker of possibilities and an
excellent networker, but has a tendency to lose momentum
towards the end of a project and to forget small details.
IMPLEMENTERS
 The implementer’s strength lies in translating the team’s
decisions and ideas into manageable and practical tasks or
actions.
 The Implementer takes their colleagues' suggestions and ideas
and turns them into positive action.
 They are efficient and self-disciplined, and can always be relied
on to deliver on time
 . They are motivated by their loyalty to the team or company,
which means that they will often take on jobs everyone else
avoids or dislikes.
 However, they may be seen as closed-minded and inflexible
since they will often have difficulty deviating from their own
well-thought-out plans, especially if such a deviation
compromises efficiency or threatens well-established practices.
COMPLETER FINISHER
 The completer/finisher’s strength lies in meticulousness,
attention to detail and the ability to meet deadlines.
 The Completer Finisher is a perfectionist and will often go
the extra mile to make sure everything is "just right," and
the things he or she delivers can be trusted to have been
double-checked and then checked again.
 The Completer Finisher has a strong inward sense of the
need for accuracy, and sets his or her own high standards
rather than working on the encouragement of others.
 They may frustrate their teammates by worrying
excessively about minor details at the expense of meeting
deadlines, and by refusing to delegate tasks that they do not
trust anyone else to perform.
SHAPERS
 The shaper’s strength lies in being goal directed. The shaper is
a dynamic individual who boldly challenges others during
discussions, can handle work pressures and has the courage to
overcome obstacles.
 The Shaper is a task-focused individual who pursues objectives
with vigour and who is driven by nervous energy and the need
to achieve - for the Shaper, winning is the name of the game.
 The Shaper is committed to achieving ends and will ‘shape’
others into achieving the aims of the team.
 He or she will challenge, argue or disagree and will display
aggression in the pursuit of goal achievement.
 Two or three Shapers in a team, according to Belbin, can lead to
conflict, aggravation and in-fighting.
TEAMWORKERS
 The teamworker’s strength lies in being a good listener, being
collaborative, co-operative, easy going and tactful.
 A Teamworker is the oil between the cogs that keeps the
machine that is the team running smoothly.
 They are good listeners and diplomats, talented at smoothing
over conflicts and helping parties understand one other
without becoming confrontational.
 Since the role can be a low-profile one, the beneficial effect
of a Teamworker can go unnoticed and unappreciated until
they are absent, when the team begins to argue, and small but
important things cease to happen.
 Because of an unwillingness to take sides, a Teamworker
may not be able to take decisive action when it is needed.
SPECIALIST
 Specialists are passionate about learning in their own particular
field.
 As a result, they are likely to be a fount of knowledge and will
enjoy imparting this knowledge to others.
 They also strive to improve and build upon their expertise.

 If there is anything they do not know the answer to, they will
happily go and find out.
 Specialists bring a high level of concentration, ability, and skill
in their discipline to the team, but can only contribute on that
specialism and will tend to be uninterested in anything which lies
outside its narrow confines.
 The Belbin Team Inventory was revised to include the Specialist
role, since the role was not revealed in the original research
ANALYSIS OF BELBIN TEAM ROLES

 Belbin’s roles are identified based on a series of statements that constitute

the ‘Self-Perception Inventory’ (SPI). The statements have to be answered
by an individual based on personal perceptions of what he or she would do
in different team situations.
 Based on the statements that you pick, and the weight that you assign to
those statements, the final scores are computed. What you get is a score for
each of the roles. The roles where you score high are the ones that define
your natural inclination within a team. A person can have strengths in more
than one role and deficiencies or weaknesses in many of the other roles.
 For instance, a person can be a good Implementer and a good Co-ordinator
but a very poor Completer/Finisher.
 This means the individual’s natural inclination during teamwork is to
facilitate interaction and decision making, that he or she is also capable of
stepping in to translate the team’s decisions into reality.
 But on the flip side, the person may be lacking as far as attention to detail
goes.
BALANCE IS KEY

 Whilst some Team Roles were more “high profile” and some
team members shouted more loudly than others, each of the
behaviours was essential in getting the team successfully
from start to finish.
 The key was balance. For example, Belbin found that a team
with no Plant struggled to come up with the initial spark of
an idea with which to push forward.
 However, once too many Plants were in the team, bad ideas
concealed good ones and non-starters were given too much
airtime.
 Similarly, with no Shaper, the team ambled along without
drive and direction, missing deadlines. With too many
Shapers, in-fighting began and morale was lowered.
BIBLIOGRAPHY-
 1. GOOGLE.COM
 2. BELVBINS WIKIPEDIA

 3.FROM TEAMS ROLE AT WORK VIDEO