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.

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.

FACTS ABOUT THE THEORY

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

People oriented

Celebral oriented

IMPLEMENTER

SHAPERCOMPLETER

ACTION ORIENTED

Co-ordinator

Teamworker

Resource

Investigator

People Skills Oriented Role

Planter

monitor/

evaluator

Specialist

Cerebral/Intellectual Role: Cerebral/Intellectual Role:

CEREBRAL ROLE

Cerebral/Intellectual Role: Cerebral/Intellectual Role:

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