Team Role Inventories

Belbin first began studying teams at Henley Management College in the 1960s. Over a period of ten years, he carried out extended observational research to determine which factors influenced team failure or success. 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. 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. However, the outcome of this research was that certain teams, predicted to be excellent based on intellect, failed to fulfil their potential. In fact, it became apparent by looking at the various combinations that it was not intellect, but balance, which enabled a team to succeed. The most successful companies tended to be those with a mix of different people, i.e. those with a range of different behaviours. In fact, nine separate clusters of behaviour turned out to be distinctive and useful, with the balance required dependent on the purpose and objectives of the team. ==Application and use==

The Belbin Team Inventory first appeared in Belbin's book Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail (1981). The inventory is protected by Belbin's copyright and cannot be reproduced in any form. Additionally, it is not normed, lacks the Specialist role and the benefit of feedback from colleagues, and does not offer Team Role feedback. Much early research is based upon this now obsolete version of the inventory. In the initial research, eight team-role behavioural styles were identified -- Chairman, Shaper, Plant, Monitor-Evaluator, Company Worker, Resource Investigator, Team Worker, and Completer-Finisher. The current schema has been refined to include a ninth style -- Specialist—and in addition has renamed the Chairman behavioural style Co-ordinator and the Company Worker style Implementer. Belbin now administers the refined Belbin Team Inventory via e-interplace, a computerised system which scores and norms the data to produce feedback reports for individuals, teams, groups and jobs. Meredith Belbin argues that the optimum size for a team is 4 people. Beyond this number, individuals do not work closely enough together to constitute a team and are defined as a group. Data from the Belbin Team Inventory can also be amalgamated and interpreted to assess how effectively a team is likely to work together, including selecting the best candidate to fulfil each role, and identifying gaps and overlaps in the Team Role distribution which might affect 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. ==Belbin Team Roles==

Plant Plants are creative, unorthodox and generators 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. The Plant might be caricatured as the absent-minded professor/inventor, and often has a hard time communicating ideas to others. Multiple Plants in a team can lead to misunderstandings, as many ideas are generated without sufficient discernment or the impetus to follow the ideas through to action. Plants can also create problems with the timing of their ideas. The fact that the team has decided on a valid way forward and is now in the implementation stage will not stop the Plant from coming up with new solutions and disrupting the implementation process. Belbin observed, "We called these clever people plants, because the chaps at Henley insisted we plant one in each group". Resource Investigator 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. Whereas 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 to follow things up. ==Validity and reliability==

Following the introduction of Belbin's approach to Team Role analysis in 1981, argue that Furnham's approach (also discussed in Fisher, Macrosson & Sharp (1996)) has fundamental problems in the definitions of several of the eight roles (see also Broucek & Randall (1996) for a more detailed treatment of this problem). Both the Fisher, et al. (2001) and the earlier Broucek & Randall (1996) find that observational and factor analytical approaches yield five rather than eight role constructs. Fisher, et al. go on to argue that this coherence of the five traits of teams is backed up by earlier research by Barrick & Mount (1991). The original research into the Belbin Team Roles was conducted with the old, copyrighted, eight-role version that was intended for an individual's own interest rather than for use as a tool. More recent studies using normed data from Belbin's e-interplace system, such as that by Aritzeta, Swailes and Senior (2004) have found higher correlations and reliability, as well as distinct analytical constructs using the online, normed, nine-role tool with observers added to give 360-degree feedback (enhancing construct validity by providing "real-world" data). Swailes and McIntyre-Bhatty also argued (2001 & 2002) that traditional attempts to measure reliability have been misapplied when it comes to the Belbin Team Role Inventory because it is neither ipsative nor non-ipsative, and an equation that took this anomaly into account gave higher estimates of reliability and validity. ==Educational applications==

The Belbin Team Inventory is used in educational settings, including higher education. Smith, Polglase & Parry (2012) applied the Belbin team role self and observer perceptions to a large cohort (145) of undergraduate students in a module assessed through two separate group projects. Students self-selected groups for the first project; for the second, groups were more 'balanced'. Results showed a slight improvement in group performance compared with that of previous cohorts, with a significant increase in first-class grades. No evidence was found linking group balance to performance; however, students recognized the value of their Belbin report when entering the job market. ==Other team role inventories==

Team Management Profile (TMP) A competitor to the Belbin system, developed independently in Australia by Dr Charles Margerison and Dr Dick McCann, is the Margerison–McCann Team Management Profile. Visually this appears to be a similar wheel with rather similar roles, whose titles are different. However, where Belbin focuses on role-based behaviour, the Team Management Profile is a psychometric which measures work preferences. In general, most Belbin roles tend to gravitate towards the relevant quadrant of the Team Management Wheel with the exception of the ‘creative’ and the ‘leadership’ roles which fail to transfer or correspond in any simple or direct way. Team Management Systems states: "Independent British Psychological Society reviews (1995, 2000 and 2003) on the Team Management Profile are available" Star Roles Model The Star Roles Model is used by organisations to describe the positions managers and mentors adopt when guiding direct-reports and mentees. The concept builds on the Group Roles model developed by Benne & Sheats in 1948, taking a short-cut route to describing preferences when guiding others. Similarly, the Roles Model follows the Mintzberg 10 management positions – drawing in the most relevant elements when considering the mentoring relationship in detail. ==See also==