Effective teams with Belbin

Created by Hannah Strunge Nissen, February 2022

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].