Bradford University

School of Management
DL MBA 2011

MANAGING PEOPLE
MAN4247M

Assessed Coursework

Student:

Ahmad Al Mwakeh UB No.: 09034736

Tutor:

Dr Sarah Mollitt Group A

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The assignment question:

A business has asked you to advise them on why some of their projects teams are failing to achieve deadlines and members blame each other for lack of contribution. Outline how Belbin's team role theory can assist you in explaining the poor performance. How would you suggest improving performance?

Table of contents:
1. 2. 3. 4. Introduction Belbin's Team Role Theory Definition and measuring of Performance: The Relation between the Belbin's Team Role Theory and Team Performance 5. 6. 7. Improving Team Performance REFERENCES Appendix

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1. Introduction:
Belbin's team role is a very well known theory in teams' formation, which is based on nine roles for the team members each one of them plays a complementary part to the other roles in the performance of the team. The theory claims that balanced teams in term of team roles will be a marker for good performance, and goals achievement. Based on many researches on the relation between the team performance and belbin's team roles, it is clearly that not all the roles have the same impact on the performance and even the presence of some roles may decrease the performance of the team in certain stage of team development stage. However the theory and the research about it give a great highlight on recommendations about the importance of the team in modern organizations as first step to good performance and how to improve the performance of the teams, a very important comment came from Katzenbach and Smith (1993) about the existence of a team alone may not lead necessarily to high performance.

2. Belbin's Team Role Theory:

Belbin's team role theory is based on a nine years study and the first version was introduced in 1981, and in 1993 a rename of the roles was made and ninth role was added. While the role was defined by six factors: personality, mental ability, current values, motivation, field constraints and experience. Belbin's idea was that teams need a balanced representation of the team roles in the team in order to have a high performance (Aritzeta et al. 2007). The description and short name of each role is given in table 1 and another table in the appendix that shows the team roles strength and allowable weaknesses.

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Table 1 Team role description. Source (Chong 2007)

Definition of Team:
Katzenbach and Smith (1993) defined group as people who meet frequently and notify each other with their actions and performance and often lack of commitment and without a necessarily common goal; on the other hand in the same article Team is defined as "a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable". As in the definition, the concept of complementary skills is the starting point for implementation of Belbin's team roles theory but as the definition did not link the above features of the team to obligatory success.

3. Definition and measuring of Performance:

How we can say that we had a good performance? Is it versus internally planned goals or benchmarked to a competitor or peer organization in the same industry, which may not did well by itself?
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Castka et al. (2001) in their article determine performance as function expressed below:

According to the above formula, ability is much related to the characteristics presented by team members (members' roles in the team and skills). Performance definitions focus in most of the articles on the end results or outcomes like meeting and exceeding customers' standards or by achieving the assigned task (Senior and Swailes, 2007). But the above definitions do not include how the team did the task and what are the accumulated and added experiences after performing the task.

Who should do the evaluation of the performance?

Zigon (1995) outlines many difficulties faces measuring of performance as: 1. What to measure? 2. How to measure? 3. Measurement should be done at both levels of individuals and team levels. Senior 1997 in her article showed that the predicted performance was conformed in 4 out of 11 in her study and 6 out of 11 within one point, and 2 out of 11 within two points. According to senior 1997 there was a positive correlation between actual and predicted performance, which was based on the balance of Belbin's team roles. Aligning with the above problems Senior (1997) mentioned that the team should be involved in the performance measurement in the setting of the criteria and rating the performance. Zigon (1995) provided a 7 steps system to measure performance presented in Table 2.

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Table 2: Zigon's seven-step process for measuring team performance (Zigon, 1995).

According to Castka et al. (2001) measuring performance enhances improvement and many improvement programs fail due to lack of proper measure.

4. The Relation between the Belbin's Team Role Theory and Team Performance:
As we have nine team roles according to Belbin's theory, which represents thinking and behaviors styles. From the belbin's points of view a presence of these roles in a team will lead to team high performance (Belbin 1981, 1993). Belbin (1993) has accepted that some members may hold more than one team role and suggest a team of 6 members as a good number. The leadership of the team can be rotated among the member and he commented that some roles match certain stages that will lead to perform to better results.

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Many researchers had reached a conclusion that not all the roles weight the same for team performance, Chong (2007) in his research showed very important conclusions about the significance correlation between (PL)-(CO)-(TW) and team performance and no significance relationship between number of team roles presented in the team and performance. This data assert on similar conclusions by Senior (1997). Another important note by Chong (2007) suggests that at different stage of development of the team a different set of roles are needed. Chong (2007) showed that role as (SP), which has a positive relationship with more developed teams. And Chong (2007) agrees with Partington & Harris (1999) about the role of (CO) which shows that (CO) predominance lead to dependency and decrease team performance and would be an inappropriate way to increase performance especially with newly formed teams. The argument about the weight of (CO) in the team performance in different researches referred to the fact not all the team in the studies in the same degree of development. An important summary done by Chong (2007) in his article showed some characteristics on High and low performance teams quoted in tables 3 and 4 blows, where he highlighted about the observation of high performance teams that "Team members take on management roles enthusiastically". Table: 3 Observations of high performance Teams; Source (Chong 2007)

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In the table 4 where Chong (2007) commented that one of the negatives is the confused team members about their roles in the team. Table: 4 Observation on Low performance teams; Source (Chong 2007)

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5. Improving Team Performance:

As seen above, team performance is a multidimensional aspect as presented in the equation of Castka (2001):

The motivation which is the responsibly of the manager of the team of the organization, the environment around the team and the ability, which represent the team roles. The presence of team roles like (PL), and (TW) and Other Team roles like (CO) and (SP) especially in well developed teams, will put the team on the right track to success and high performance. So according to the stage of development and the stage of the task we have to choose the proper mix of team roles, in addition to create a good method of performance evaluation to assure continuous improving and success to the team.

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6. REFERENCES:

Aritzeta, A., Swailes, S., and Senior, B. (2007), 'Belbin's Team Role Model: Development, Validity and Application for Team Building ', Journal of management studies, 44 (1).

Belbin, R. M. (1981). 'Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail.' London: Heinemann.

Belbin, R. M. (1993). Team Roles at Work. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Castka, P., et al. (2001), 'Factors affecting successful implementation of high performance teams', Team Performance Management: an International Journal, 7 (4), 29-36.

Chong, E. (2007). 'Role balance and team development: A study of team role characteristics underlying high and low performing teams'. Journal of Behavioral & Applied Management, 8, 202-217

Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D. K. (1993), 'The Wisdom of Teams. Creating the High Performance Organization' (McGraw-Hill). Partington, D. and Harris, H. (1999), ' Team balance and team performance: and empirical study', The Journal of Management Development, 18, 8,694701.

Senior, B. (1997), 'Team Roles and Team Performance: Is There 'Really' A Link?', Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 70 (3). Senior, B. and Swailes, S. (2007), 'Inside Management Teams: Developing a teamwork Survey instrument', British Journal of management, 18, 138-53.

Zigon, J. (1995), 'Team Performance Measurement: A Process For Creating Team Performance Standards', How to measure the results of work teams (Zigon Performance Group).

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7. appendix:
Belbin Team Roles

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