I remember one of my conversation with Rigga, 6 months ago at  the third floor, Programming Laboratory, we talked about personal roles  in a team. This morning, i saw the course material file about that, and i decided to do this posting.

According to Belbin

A team is not a bunch of people with job titles, but a congregation of individuals, each of whom has a role which is understood by other members. Members of a team seek out certain roles and they perform most effectively in the ones that are most natural to them.

• Build productive working relationships
• Select and develop high-performing teams
• Raise self-awareness and personal effectiveness
• Build mutual trust and understanding
• Aid recruitment processes

 Belbin Team Roles measure behaviour, not personality, and so can be defined as:

A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.

By identifying our Team Roles, we can ensure that we use our strengths to advantage and that we manage our weaknesses as best we can. Sometimes, this means being aware of the pitfalls and making an effort to avoid them.

The Nine Team Roles are :























Based on the description, we can have summary as follow :

1. Shaper, Implementer and Complementer-finisher are action-oriented roles 
2. Co-ordinator, team worker and resource investigator are people-oriented roles
3. Plant, Monitor-Evaluator and Specialist are Cerebral (thinking) roles

During his research, Belbin found that each of the behaviours were essential in getting the team successfully from start to finish. The key was balance. For example, Belbin found that a team with no Plants 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.

It doesn't meant that we have to fullfill our team with all of the roles, but when we have to face the condition in teamwork, we can manages ourself, according to our position, to fit the team goal. And still, in this thing , i need to learn a lot, ^_^.

Source :
1. TQM course material
2. http://www.belbin.com