The Belbin Team Inventory is a personality test, also called the Belbin Self-Perception
Inventory, Belbin Team Role Inventory, SPI or BTRSPI.
It was devised by Meredith Belbin to measure preference for nine Team Roles; he had identified
those whilst studying numerous teams at Henley Management College.
The Inventory assesses how an individual behaves in a team environment.
The assessment includes 360-degree feedback from observers as well as the individual's
own evaluation of their behaviour, and contrasts how they see their behaviour with how their
colleagues do.
Belbin himself asserts that the team roles are not equivalent to personality types, and
that unlike the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is a psychometric instrument used to
sort people into one of 16 personality types, the Belbin Inventory scores people on how
strongly they express behavioural traits from nine different team roles.
A person may and often does exhibit strong tendencies towards multiple roles.
History Belbin first began studying teams at Henley
Management College in the 1970s.
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 distinct 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.
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 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.
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 and refrain from getting bogged down in detail.
The Plant bears a strong resemblance to the popular caricature of 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.
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.
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.
Also enjoy new experiences.
Co-ordinator 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.
Co-ordinators are sometimes perceived to be manipulative and will tend to delegate all
work, leaving nothing but the delegating for them to do.
Shaper The Shaper is a task-focused individual who
pursues objectives with vigour and who is driven by tremendous energy and the need to
achieve - for the Shaper, winning is the name of the game.
The Shaper provides the necessary drive to ensure that the team is kept moving and does
not lose focus or momentum.
Shapers are people who challenge the team to improve.
They are dynamic and usually extroverted people who enjoy stimulating others, questioning
norms, and finding the best approaches for solving problems.
The Shaper is the one who shakes things up to make sure that all possibilities are considered
and that the team does not become complacent.
Shapers could risk becoming aggressive and bad-humoured in their attempts to get things
done.
Shapers often see obstacles as exciting challenges and they tend to have the courage to push
on when others feel like quitting.
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.
Teamworker 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 another 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's needed.
Implementer 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.
Finisher The 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 and by refusing
to delegate tasks that they do not trust anyone else to perform.
Specialist Specialists are passionate about learning
in their own particular field.
As a result, they are likely to be a fountain 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 because no specialised knowledge was required for
the simulation exercise.
Validity and reliability Following the introduction of Belbin's approach
to Team Role analysis in 1981, an independent study of the psychometric properties of the
instruments was published in 1993 in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
Belbin took to task the authors, Furnham, Steele & Pendleton and the Journal provided
Furnham space to reply.
Belbin argued that the instruments were not intended for scholarly inquiry, but to inform
management consulting practices.
Additionally, Belbin maintains that the Belbin Team Inventory is not a psychometric instrument
and hence applying tests for psychometric properties are irrelevant.
There have been several other scholarly studies of the validity and reliability of Belbin's
approach over the nearly 15 years since the Furnham-Belbin exchange, most of which have
used the inventory in its original form.
Fisher, Hunter & MacRosson argue that Furnham's approach) has fundamental problems in the
definitions of several of the 8 roles for a more detailed treatment of this problem).
Both the Fisher, et al. and the earlier Broucek & Randall find that observational and factor
analytical approaches yield 5 rather than 8 role constructs.
Fisher, et al. go on to argue that this coherence of the 5 traits of teams is backed up by earlier
research by Barrick & Mount.
The original research into the Belbin Team Roles was conducted with the old, copyright,
8-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 have found higher correlations and reliability, as well
as distinct analytical constructs using the online, normed, 9-role tool with observers
added to give 360-degree feedback.
Swailes and McIntyre-Bhatty also argued 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 being used in
educational settings, including higher education.
Smith, Polglase & Parry applied the Belbin team role self and observer perceptions to
a large cohort 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.
Belbin usefully contextualizes regularly occurring group work issues and provides students with
ways of managing these issues.
Other team role inventories Team Management System
A competitor to the Belbin system, developed independently in Australia by Charles Margerison
and Dick McCann, is the Margerison–McCann Team Management System.
This can be shown as a similar wheel with rather similar roles, whose titles however
are different.
The company states: "Independent British Psychological Society reviews available on each Profile"
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 Collaboration
Enneagram of Personality Group behavior
Meredith Belbin Organization Science
References
External links Belbin website
TMS website Belbin copyright information
Method, Reliability & Validity, Statistics & Research: A Comprehensive Review of Belbin
Team Roles Using Belbin's leadership role to improve
team effectiveness: An empirical investigation