Belbin team role theory: It is a theoretical model for analyzing team roles and teamwork proposed by Meredith Belbin, a British organizational behaviorist and former director of the Cambridge Industrial Training Research Department. Belbin conducted two important research team experiments over a period of 9 years to meet the reasons for the success of the research team. In 1981, he first proposed the model in his book "Team Management: Why They Success or Failure". In 1993, he proposed the correction results again.

In a team, people assume team roles in addition to taking on job roles (or functional roles) related to professional skills and position level. Team roles reflect specific behavior patterns that people are determined by interests, personality, and mindset.

Team members have dual roles, namely functional roles (determined by individual expertise and skills, and are roles assigned by work tasks) and team roles (determined by individual temperament and personality, and are characteristic patterns that individuals show when interacting with other members). Members contribute to team goals by playing both roles.

There are nine types of team roles, namely coordinator, shaper, innovator, resource investigator, monitoring evaluator, collaborator, executor, finisher and expert (newly added in 1993). These role features affect the overall team and individual Performance in the team.

A successful team must include these nine roles and form a strong team through the complementary strengths of members. Team roles are not related to team size, and a member may assume multiple roles, or multiple members may assume one role.

Different people have different role preferences. Due to personality characteristics and intellectual factors, individuals may be more suitable for certain roles. Team members correctly understand and develop their team role knowledge and abilities, which can promote the effective development of the team.

Executioner (CW, Company Worker)

Coordinator (CO, Coordinator)

Shaper (SH, Shaper)

Innovator (PL, Planter)

Resource Investigator (RI, Resource Investigator)

Monitor Evaluator (ME, Monitor Evaluator)

Collaborator (TW, Team Worker)

Finisher (FI, Finisher)

Specialist

Table 1: Belbin team role theory

Summarize:

Coordinator (CO): Mature, confident, trustworthy, able to clarify goals and promote decision-making, not necessarily the smartest person.

Innovator (PL): Creative, imaginative, good at breaking routines and solving problems, but not good at interacting with ordinary people.

Shaper (SH): energetic, extroverted, excited, and love to challenge. Actively find solutions in the face of difficulties, but prone to losing temper.

Collaborator (TW): Social, gentle, understanding, helpful, can create a good atmosphere, but is indecisive in difficult circumstances.

Completed (FI): Hardworking, conscientious, good at finding mistakes and being punctual, but sometimes overly worried and unwilling to empower others.

Executor (CW): Disciplined, trustworthy, conservative, efficient, able to turn ideas into actions, but a little stubborn.

Resource Investigator (RI): Extrovert, enthusiastic, talkative, actively explore opportunities, but soon lose interest after a moment of enthusiasm.

Specialist: Honest, focused, able to provide professional knowledge and skills, but the professional field is relatively narrow.

Monitoring Evaluator (ME): Calm, strategic, highly judged, comprehensive, but lack the ability to promote and inspire others.

The Belbin team role theory has been promoted and successfully applied in many major companies in the world (such as Boeing, Mitsubishi, British Telecom, IBM, Nokia, etc.) and institutions (such as the United Nations, the European Executive Committee, the World Bank, etc.). According to statistics, more than 40% of the top 100 companies in the UK have adopted this model. In team management, it is mainly used in the following aspects:

Form a team with reasonable role matching: When forming a team, you should not only pay attention to the individual abilities of the members, but also pay attention to the reasonable combination and role matching among members. A good team requires multiple role members, such as innovators, finishers, resource investigators, executors, monitoring evaluators, collaborators, etc. In actual operation, the team size and tasks are different. Nine characters are not necessarily borne by nine people, but the role functions cannot be lacking or imbalanced. Managers should pay attention to the functions and roles of team members, so that talents can perform their duties and complement each other's functions. The team division of labor should try to make the roles assumed by members consistent with their preferences. When adding members, you need to analyze the existing team role combination status, examine the candidate's role competence, and select suitable members.

Building an efficient working team: Team building should grasp the differences in character and temperament of members' roles and promote organic integration of the team. A mature team is formed in the process of continuous role integration, conflict, adaptation and improvement. Members effectively play the role of teams is the key to forming an effective team. Factors that affect the effectiveness of team members’ roles include role ambiguity (not knowing what others expect), role conflict (different people expect differently or inconsistent with their own plans) and role overload (inability to achieve all expectations). These factors will have adverse effects on members and reduce team efficiency. To solve these problems, team members need to accurately position themselves, be clear about the expectations of the team and others, increase role knowledge and skills, make behaviors meet role requirements, develop team sensitivity and skills through practice, and also need to internalize roles. Team building can refer to the team role model, use evaluation tools to diagnose member role status, and reduce the incidence of role problems through role training, standardization, exchange and other methods to promote team development.

Develop dynamic balanced work teams: An effective team consists of suitable members who play different roles. Teams with nine necessary roles can achieve an efficient cooperation state, namely "static balance of the team." In team development, we should pay more attention to dynamic balance, that is, when the team lacks a certain role, other members can automatically assume it and maintain the normal functions of the team. The organizational environment changes and frequent talent flows, maintaining dynamic balance between teams is crucial to the maintenance and development of the team. The key to maintaining dynamic balance is to enhance the role resilience of team members. Members should deepen their self-awareness, improve role adaptability, understand other role characteristics, learn new role skills, and increase role flexibility. Increased team member resilience can be done from two levels: cognition (guiding individuals to correctly understand their team roles and others) and behavior (shaping team role behaviors through role exchange, learning and practice).

Complete roles: A successful team requires a comprehensive balance of nine roles. Only when a complete role can a complete function be achieved.

Tolerate people's shortcomings and employ people's strengths: When forming a team, managers should fully understand the characteristics of each role, tolerate people's shortcomings and employ people's strengths, thoroughly understand the nature of subordinates, and form a high-performance team with optimized temperament structure.

Respect differences and achieve complementarity: For a given job, ideal candidates are almost non-existent, but the team can be perfected through the complementarity of members in team roles. Team heterogeneity and diversity performance make the team vibrate.

Enhance flexibility and actively fill up: Successful teams need to form an atmosphere of collective decision-making and mutual responsibility, and team members should cultivate the awareness of active fill up. When there is a lack of team roles, members should enhance their flexibility and actively change roles, so that the team's temperament structure tends to be reasonable, and better achieve team performance goals. The multiple natures of most people's personalities and endowments make team role transformation possible, which has also been confirmed by test results and practice.

I think I can contribute to the team: including options such as discovering new opportunities, cooperating with all kinds of people, and giving ideas.

In the team, I may have weaknesses: options involving requirements for meeting organization, attitudes toward others' opinions, etc.

When I work with others, I cover descriptions such as affecting others’ abilities and preventing work negligence.

My characteristics in the work team are: including understanding colleagues’ interests and challenging others’ insights.

At work, I am satisfied because: expressions involving analysis of situations and promoting work relationships.

If I suddenly give me a difficult job and the time is limited, I am not familiar with the staff: including options such as formulating a plan and selecting cooperative personnel.

For problems encountered in team work or working with people around you: descriptions of attitudes toward those who are blocking their progress, ability to deal with complex problems, etc.

Team roles: CO (coordinator), ME (supervisor and evaluator), SH (shaper), CF (completer), RI (resource investigator), IM (executor), TW (team worker), etc.

Role Score: After completing the questionnaire, you will get the score for each team role.

Answer sheet: Fill in the option scores into the specified form, check whether the sum of the scores in each row is 10 points, and then fill in another form correspondingly. Calculate the scores in each column to obtain the scores of each of the 8 styles. Determine your main role type in the team by comparing with the standard score interval (very low, low, medium, high, very high).

[A company conducted a Belbin team role test on middle and senior leaders of the company, and conducted it in 30 minutes indoors in batches, requiring the test paper to be completed independently based on the first feeling. After the test, eight team role scores were calculated. The first two or three items with higher scores were the main character characteristics of the subjects. More than 90% of the testers believe that the test results are basically consistent with the actual performance].

Table 6: Team role test results in the bottom two

Table 7: Team role test results in the top three

The test results show that there are many TW and CW team role types in the middle and senior management teams of the enterprise, especially lacking the role types of PL and CH teams, which is different from the balanced teams, and the distribution of team role types is unreasonable. This unreasonableness manifests itself in corporate management as:

Slow response to new things in the external environment, conservatively and unwilling to reform, is the main weakness of the CW and TW types.

Management is centralized, and the main leaders do not trust their subordinates, are unwilling to delegate work, and are responsible for both big and small things. This is an outstanding manifestation of the role of the CF team.

The meetings are constantly but inefficient. The delegates are good at expressing their opinions, but the leaders are hesitant and the problems are often left unresolved. This is an outstanding manifestation of the SH type.

The characteristics and behaviors of middle and senior leaders of the enterprise affect the development of the enterprise. Understanding the current distribution of team roles will help the enterprise consider team role matching in the selection and promotion of leadership personnel, form a balanced team, and select suitable leaders according to the external environment. At the same time, team members should also adjust their team role types according to actual conditions and give full play to their team resource advantages.