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Executive Summary

The report set out to critically evaluate the poor team performance in a business using Belhin’s team theory. It further assess causes the team unable to achieve deadlines and propose improvement for future.

Meredith Belbin’s team role theory is used to analyse team’s performance. Belbin’s approach is particularly useful in identifying strengths and weaknesses; enabling tasks to be allocated based on competence. A method for retrospective analysis of the team’s performance was developed using Belbin’s framework. In some cases the perception of self differed significantly from the observed actions and behaviours. It recommend each team member to completed Belbin’s psychometric test to find out the level of cohesion and team role balance which are requisite for team to perform effectively. Furthermore, it explores the group’s problems in reflecting on their roles, retrospectively, using Belbin’s terms.

The assignment covered small to medium size business situation, where project teams are failing to achieve targets and team members blame each other for lack of contribution.

It is concluded that team roles are identified and assigned correctly, organization designed with clear objectives and team members are committed to delivering, whatever type of team it is, then the chances of the team becoming ‘high performing’ will be significantly increased.

Introduction

Organization are using teams more widely them ever before. Human resource personnel number-one priority is teamwork and their major issue is how to capitalize on it so as to make it work better. Team are now can be found everywhere in the organizations ranging form production, service, management and projects. It always remain a challenge, to find correct makeup of a team that is likely to achieve organizational goal. It further raise issues to identify the factors and processes that give rise to increased performance (Beal et al. 2003).

What is team?

Team is a psychological group whose members share a common goal which they pursue collaboratively. Members can only succeed or fail as a whole, and all share the benefits and costs of collective success and failure (Buchanan and Huczynski 2004).

Team is defined as two or more people, each with separate responsibilities and/or assignments, working together for a common goal (Salas et al., 1992).

Team members share a common goal and they pursue collaboratively, result they can only succeed or fail as a whole. The benefit and cost of success or failure is also shared between individual in a team.

Individuals
Individuals working alone are not common in organisations, or indeed anywhere else. It is rare for people to work totally alone to complete their tasks.

Groups
People come together into formal and informal groups to share information that helps them to complete their individual tasks more easily, or more successfully.

Teams
Co-operative working is required to complete a common objective

Different types of team operate within a organization based on their objectives and types of output, can be categories into four main type (Sundstrom, Meuse and Futrell 1990) advice, action, project and production.

Team differ from each other in term autonomy, which define extend to which a team experiences freedom, independence and discretion in decisions in the performance of its tasks (Buchanan and Huczynski 2004). Key ingredients of effective teams are skills, commitment of accountability (figure 2). While organization benefits from performance and growth it also result in collective work products and personal growth.

Project team

The project team is a collection of employees from different work areas brought together to accomplish a specific task within a finite time. The team member in a project area at same hierarchical level but can be from different field that make it cross-functional. They are also considered as super teams, are created when creative problem-solving is required involving the application of different types of specialized knowledge. They are helpful when there is a need to co-ordinate closely the work on a specific project.

Team Performance
As with individual performance, team performance is a vital determinant and frequently used indicator of organizational outcome. Achieving the team's and therefore, the organization's goal can be objectified by examining the team's performance. By integrating the distinctive skills and characteristics of team members, better performance is expected as compared to individuals working independently to achieve the same goal (Naquin and Tynan, 2003).
Team performance may be evaluated against a variety of criteria, such as reducing mistakes, continuous improvement in the quality of outputs, increased productivity, or customer satisfaction (Manz and Neck, 1997). Developing high performance teams that can fulfil their demanding and dynamic responsibilities is only possible where there are high levels of co-operation and solidarity between team members. Another aspect of performance is cohesion, which reflects to some extent the interaction among team members.

Team performance is directly proportional to team effectiveness. When discussing a team performance, it seems contradictory to also talk about leadership. If a team is truly working together, where is the place of a leader in such a situation? Yet, even a team has a dominant person who, for our purposes, can be called a leader who may very well play a central role in determining group performance.

Naquin and Tynan (2003) argue that, often, when a team fails, individuals are blamed for the lack of achieving the desired goals. There is need to see the failure causes, would people attribute failure to the fact that cohesiveness was low, or that a leader was not able to extract that extra amount of work required to achieve?

Transactional leadership is associated with contingent reinforcement and allows the worker freedom to perform as he/she sees fit with the leader intervening when a problem occurs. The leader is often required as charismatic, a visionary who provides individual attention and intellectual stimulation.

Discussion

Belbin’s Team Theory
Meredith Belbin’s work is by far the most influential team role theory to date (Furnham et al., 1993a). Many of the recent organizational behaviour authors have adopted the work of Belbin and prescribed it as the model to be followed.

Belbins and his colleague developed framework for understanding of roles within a team (Belbin, 1996). These were derived for observation and using personality assessment; 16PF personality inventory questionnaire and he produced a self-report questionnaire known as the Belbins Team Role Self-Perception Inventory (team role questionnaire).

Belbin team roles describe a pattern of behaviour that characterises one person’s behaviour in relationship to another in facilitating the progress of a team. Different clusters of behaviour were identified by Dr Belbin as underlying the success of the teams. These successful clusters of behaviour were then given names. Hence the emergence of nine team roles which are:
· Action-oriented roles - Shaper, Implementer, and Completer Finisher
· People-oriented roles - Co-ordinator, Teamworker and Resource Investigator
· Cerebral roles - Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist

The value of Belbin team-role theory lies in enabling an individual or team to benefit from self-knowledge and adjust according to the demands being made by the external situation.

Belbin prescribes nine major roles of the effective team (see Table 1) more detail description in Appendix 1.

Table 1

Roles :Description
1. Plant: creative problem solver ignore details
2. Resource Investigator: contacts, extrovert lose interest
3. Co-ordinator-good chair: confident, manipulative
4. Shaper: challenges, drives, resolves issues provocative
5. Monitor: evaluator-strategic, discerning, judges accuracy does not inspire others
6. Teamworker: Co-operative, diplomatic, perceptive indecisive
7. Implementer: turns ideas into actions inflexible to new ideas
8. Completer: detailed conscientious, anxious delivers on time worries, reluctant to delegate, may be too precise on detail.
9. Specialist: single minded, self starting, provides important knowledge/skills in rare supply narrow contributor, overlooks` big picture` as end result to achieve.

Team role
A team role as defined by Dr Meredith Belbin is: "A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way (Belbin, 1996)."

Belbin team roles describe a pattern of behaviour that characterises one person’s behaviour in relationship to another in facilitating the progress of a team. The value of Belbin team-role theory lies in enabling an individual or team to benefit from self-knowledge and adjust according to the demands being made by the external situation.

During a period of over nine years, Meredith Belbin and his team of researchers based at Henley Management College, England, studied the behaviour of managers from all over the world. Managers taking part in the study were given a battery of psychometric tests and put into teams of varying composition, while they were engaged in a complex management exercise.

Their different core personality traits, intellectual styles and behaviours were assessed during the exercise. As time progressed different clusters of behaviour were identified as underlying the success of the teams. These successful clusters of behaviour were then given names. Hence the emergence of nine team roles.

Results from this research showed that there are a finite number of behaviours or team roles which comprise certain patterns of behaviour which can be adopted naturally by the various personality types found among people at work.

The accurate delineation of these team roles is critical in understanding the dynamics of any management or work team.

It is difficult to work effectively with people without some reasonable expectations of how they are going to perform. Self and Observer Assessments show how an individual feels and how an individual behaves in a group.

Observer Assessments provide independent evidence about an individual’s team roles. A Self-Perception test is only as good as an individual’s sense of personal realism. Some people answer in terms of how they would like to contribute rather than how they really behave.

Team roles develop and mature. These may change with experience and conscious attention. Different team roles may come to the fore in response to the needs of particular situations.
The sharing of team roles increases understanding and enables mutual expectations to be met. Disappointments will then be less likely.

Allowable Weakness
Sometimes strength in one role has to be bought at the cost of what might be seen as a weakness in another context. For example, a person whose preferred team role is Monitor Evaluator is likely to be objective, impartial and good at carefully weighing up all possibilities to make the right decision. Yet someone with these strengths may well come across as being unenthusiastic or even boring. Any failure to inspire is apt to obscure the true strengths of a Monitor Evaluator. That weakness can be reckoned the price that necessarily has to be paid for the strength and in this sense it is termed Allowable.

Team-Role Sacrifice
In some circumstances an individual will need to forego using his/her leading or preferred team role and adopt another in its place. This shift may be rendered necessary due to the lack of a good example of a desired role within the team or because another person is already contributing on common preferred ground. Such a shift from preferred behaviour is known as "making a team-role sacrifice".

A person’s overall strongest roles are the ones most appreciated by other people. Develop and play these roles with enthusiasm, because this is where you are likely to make a mark. At the same time note of your lowest roles and find a strategy to avoid exposure by trying to play them. So try to work with people who are strong in the roles in which you are weak.

Analysis

The Belbin’s team role theory is used to establish the natural roles within the group. It raised awareness of the potential strengths and weaknesses that the team possessed. Belbin’s psychometric test was completed by each team member, the results of which led the group to believe that specific strengths and weaknesses existed within the team .

Tasks were thus allocated based on competence, as indicated by the results of the psychometric test. It is observed in teams sometime members instinctively modified their natural roles as they were motivated to put the task and team needs ahead of their individual needs.

16PF5
This psychometric assessment is one of the most widely used personality tools in the UK in terms of recruitment, selection and personal development.

The 16PF5 is based on the work of Raymond Cattell, a Psychologist, who identified 16 personality traits (traits such as dominance, liveliness, rule consciousness and openness to change)

These traits form the basis of the underlying influences on the way in which we behave and are the source of the observable behaviours we see.

Individually or in combination, these traits are assessed and a profile is created. This gives the individual an understanding of how they compare to the general population and can help individuals to understand themselves and their behaviour or can aid organisations in terms of decision making in the recruitment or development of staff.

Implications

Introducing Belbin’s team role theory within business, the following practical implications need to be taken into account:
· Some team members may have an inaccurate perception of their own natural role in team situations. This may distort the image of the group make-up based on Belbin’s theoretical approach.
· Some team members may not be able to transform their ability to the actual group project at hand. For instance, there may be two equally capable shapers within any given group; however, the more forceful character will tend to influence the team’s course of action more significantly, thus leaving the other to fulfil a different role.
· Team members will need to satisfy roles alien to them. Not all groups will have the ideal mix; therefore individual members will adopt positions that they do not naturally fit - in order to satisfy the needs of the group.

It is observed in most of the business where team are not performing, that the roles which some group members actually filled were in some cases very different from those suggested by the psychometric test results. The group does not, however, see this as invalidating Belbin’s work in any way. Belbin’s approach is targeted at the formation of a project team from scratch. The group found Belbin’s ideas invaluable in identifying the distinct strengths and weaknesses and for allocating roles based on competences.
Lesson Learnt

The application of Belbin’s team role theory will provide an insight into the blend of roles necessary for a team to perform effectively. Belbin team roles describe a pattern of behaviour that characterises one person’s behaviour in relationship to another, particularly in the context of a team.

Revisiting Team Roles
The value of Belbin team-role theory lies in enabling an individual or team to benefit from self-knowledge and adjust according to demands made on them. Belbin Team Roles reports can help busineses in a number of ways:
· Work more effectively in teams
· Enhances your Recruitment Process
· Assists Employee / Team / Organisational Development
· Helps resolve confilcts
· Can improve the job evaluation process
· Reports only take 10 minutes to complete and a similar time to process
· They are effective at individual, 1 to 1, team, department or organisational level

Task assignment
Assigning a task to a team is as important as to look after effective functioning of work teams. J. Richard Hackman (1990) guideline to achieve effective functioning and getting success through team.

· The task assign should be appropriate for the team.
· Team as identity should be recoginized by its own member and others in the organization.
· The Team has clear authority over the task.
· Promotion of teamwork through structure of team, task, team member and team norms.
· Team must be supported by organization by means; by policies, system to help their need.
· Expert coaching and feedback are provided to team when required, whenever needed basis.

Selection Process
Selection process should be implemented to identify team roles and should then be given personal development programs. Good team leadership is crucial.
The relationship between team size and time to achieve goal is also important. Teams of four to six individuals with about four months to complete their projects were found to reach the performing stage the quickest.

Finally, the organization committed to more projects than it could handle effectively and this had a demotivating influence on both team leaders and team members.

Another requirement for a team to perform well is that there should be strong social interaction between its members. However, this interaction cannot be guaranteed by the formal rules of an organisation.

The most important factor creating the interaction among the team members, and the synergy related with it, is the existence of a climate of trust. Trust also affects the outputs of the team and consequently the outputs of the organisation, both directly and indirectly (Erdem and Ozen 2000).

Win-Win teams

Win-win team must be having these characteristics (Prowse, 2006)
· 3-30 People teams
· Across functions (e.g. production, marketing, sales, training)
· Across organisation to resolve complex problems
· Ignore hierarchical solutions based upon status
· Can mmanage themselves
· Arrange own schedules, set own targets
· Order own equipment and supplies
· Improve product quality
· Interact with customers and other superteams

If team roles are identified and assigned correctly, organization degined with clear objectives and team members are committed to delivering, whatever type of team it is, then the chances of the team becoming ‘high performing’ will be significantly increased, and the team will certainly not under-perform.

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