Effective teams with Belbin

The English psychologist Meredith Belbin has developed a team role concept called the Belbin Team Role Inventory, which is made to optimize and balance teamwork. In a well-balanced team using the Team Role Inventory concept, it is possible to weigh out the group's weaknesses and exploit the group's full potential. Belbin's team roles are composed and developed to create high-performing teams. Through years of human behavior studies, Belbin has developed a model that explains how people cooperate and used it to find nine team roles who should be present in teams to ensure efficiency and quality. During the years after Belbin’s team role analysis was revealed, multiple studies have been made for validity and reliability. Stephen Swailes has examined the team roles in different studies attempting to validate Belbin’s theory. Swailes found that the model is relatively valid despite indications of weak discriminant validity among some of the team roles [5].

Introducing Belbin’s team roles

In 1981 the first edition of “Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail” by Belbin was published. It peaked in sales nine years after the first publication and has been popular ever since. Meredith Belbin made the Team Role model concerning management teams. Nine team roles were introduced, and the roles were defined as a pattern of behavior characteristics [6]. People were keen to learn more about their Team Role profiles and discover how to get the advantage of their potential. The Belbin methodology has had great success and is today used in more than 20 countries around the world for both private and public sectors [4].