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Journal of
Managerial Belbin's team role theory:
Psychology
17,1
for non-managers also?
S.G. Fisher, T.A. Hunter and W.D.K. Macrosson
14 University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Keywords Teamwork, Managers, Employees
Received November 2000
Revised August 2001 Abstract Belbin team role scores derived from the 16PF5 personality questionnaire data were
Accepted August 2001 obtained from a sample of volunteers drawn from industrial and local authority organizations.
The volunteers, comprising male and female managers and non-managers, with approximately
equal numbers in each of the four possible categories, were set into teams. Approximately half of
the 55 teams comprised solely managers, the other half solely non-managers. The distribution of
Belbin team roles over all the teams was not controlled. All teams completed a business game
typically used for training managers in team decision making. The distribution of Belbin scores
amongst all the volunteers and the results of the business game provided evidence in support of
the claim that Belbin's team role theory can be applied to non-managerial personnel.
Belbin's team role theory, originally described in his book Management Teams.
Why They Succeed or Fail (Belbin, 1981), was developed from his work among
managers and was formulated with their activities and needs in mind. As is
now well known, Belbin proposed that for the optimal operation of a
management team eight personality-related team roles needed to be fulfilled.
He coined special names for them, completer finisher, chairman, company
worker, monitor evaluator, resource investigator, plant, shaper and team
worker, and suggested that some individuals possess a strong preference to
operate in one or more of these roles. In a later work, Team Roles at Work,
Belbin (1993a)
re-named the chairman and company worker the co-ordinator and implementer
respectively, and added a ninth role, the specialist. This ninth role identified the
need for a team to have an individual who provided knowledge and skills in
rare supply. However, it is not a role identifiable through personality tests.
Early users of Belbin's management team role theory accessed team role
scores via the self-perception team role inventory published in Management
Teams. Why They Succeed or Fail (Belbin, 1981). However, subsequent
investigation (Furnham et al., 1993a, b; Belbin, 1993b; Fisher et al., 1996;
Broucek and Randell, 1996) of the ipsative self-perception team role inventory
led to the recommendation (Broucek and Randell, 1996) that it not be used for
the derivation of Belbin team role scores. Not all users of and investigators into
Belbin's team role theory have been mindful of the recommendation (Arroba
and Wedgwood-Oppenheim, 1994; Lessem and Baruch, 2000; Partington and
Harris, 1999; Senior, 1997, 1998; Senior and Swales, 1998; Shi and Tang, 1997;
Watkins and Gibson-Sweet, 1997). Furthermore, questions have been raised by
Journal of Managerial Psychology,
Broucek and Randell (1996) regarding the construct validity of the Belbin team
Vol. 17 No. 1, 2002, pp. 14-20.
# MCB UP Limited, 0268-3946
roles, but their validation study was based on scores derived from the self-
DOI 10.1108/02683940210415906 perception team role inventory. Fortunately, access to the original eight roles
can be made (Dulewicz, 1995) through two well-known personality Belbin's
questionnaires, Cattell's 16PF and Saville and Holdsworth's OPQ. Dulewicz's team role
(1995) paper is currently the only published investigation into the construct theory
validities of Belbin team roles which has been based on scores derived from the
two major personality questionnaires. Employing data collected from 100
middle managers, Dulewicz (1995, p. 91) noted that his ``results provide support
. . . for the construct validity of seven of the eight team roles''. The monitor 15
evaluator lacked sufficient support, but Dulewicz (1995) was able to advance
cogent reasons, that did not undermine the construct validity of this team role,
to explain how this result may have come about.
However, acquaintance with Belbin's theory engenders the notion that its
potential is probably not limited to the management cadre solely. The
behaviours which each of the team roles bring to the process of making
decisions are needed universally, irrespective of the level of the organization in
which that activity occurs. Whether the decision-making team is formed from
shopfloor workers, middle management or board-level personnel is immaterial
since good group decision making requires task leadership, goal resourcing
and imaginative ideas, as well as critical self-appraisal, attention to detail and
enthusiastic endeavour. In addition, the human relations aspects of the group
itself need leadership and maintenance. Belbin's theory provides for all of these
needs.
If the Belbin theory fits so neatly with the process of team decision making
the question then arises: ``Why can't Belbin's team role theory be viewed as a
general theory for teams, why must it be for management teams only?'' In
earlier studies of the Belbin theory (Fisher et al., 1996) the issue was raised over
the appropriateness of employing university undergraduate students as
subjects in the investigation. It was noted then that current practice among
most employers was to recruit managers almost exclusively from the ranks of
newly graduated university students. With that in mind it seemed reasonable
at the time to use undergraduates as surrogates for managers. However, apart
from that brief reference, the generality of the Belbin theory to ranks other than
managerial has not been addressed in the literature or by Belbin himself. An
opportunity for improved team performance may be being missed by limiting
Belbin team role theory to management alone when the theory could be applied
equally profitably in all levels of an organisation.
This paper attempts to address the issue of the generality of Belbin team role
theory from two standpoints: first, the frequency of occurrence of the various
Belbin team roles within the ranks of non-managerial employees, and second,
the performance of non-managerial teams in a team decision-making exercise
designed for training managers. Addressing the frequency issue first, it is
posited that if certain Belbin team roles were discovered to be absent among
non-managerial employees, the Belbin team role theory would appear to have
limited generality, for one cannot build Belbin-type teams without the full
complement of roles. Thus, an examination of the Belbin profiles of a sample of
non-managerial employees would resolve the issue by revealing the availability
Journal of of each of the roles. The second issue relates to performance. If it were found
Managerial that, in a typical managerial team decision-making exercise, the performances
Psychology of managerial teams and non-managerial teams were significantly different, the
generality of the Belbin team role theory would, again, appear limited. Teams
17,1 were formed, data were collected from employees, and an experiment
conducted in which a comparison was made between the performances of
16 managerial and non-managerial teams in a team decision-making exercise
designed for training managers.

Method
Subjects
During 1996 and 1997 a total of 55 teams comprising 187 male and 151 female
volunteer subjects, mean age 38.1 (SD = 9.9) and 37.2 (SD = 10.9) years
respectively, were recruited. A total of five prominent multinational manufacturing
organizations and two large indigenous UK firms, all with plants located in
Scotland, provided 14 teams (44 males, mean age = 36 years, SD = 8.4, 20 females,
mean age = 30, SD = 6.5) comprising managerial personnel and 14 teams (107
males, mean age = 39 years, SD = 10.5, 11 females, mean age = 27, SD = 6.3)
comprising non-managerial personnel. A total of 13 public service organizations
such as local district councils, employment service, and NHS Trusts provided 14
teams (33 males, mean age = 33 years, SD = 9.4, 81 females, mean age = 41, SD =
10.5) comprising managerial and 13 teams (three males, mean age = 29 years, SD =
6.7, 39 females, mean age = 36, SD = 10.9) non-managerial personnel. The
composition of the teams are shown in Table I.

Belbin team role scores


Following the advice of Furnham et al. (1993a, b), and Broucek and Randell (1996),
Belbin team roles scores were derived from 16PF personality questionnaires, a
personality questionnaire which measures 16 primary aspects of adult personality,
and not from the Belbin team role self-perception inventory. The 16 Personality
Factor Questionnaire Form 5 (16PF5) which is published by The Institute of
Personality and Ability Testing and distributed in the UK by NFER-Nelson Ltd
was administered to every participant. The questionnaire generated a score for
each team member for each of the 16 personality factors. The raw 16PF5 scores
were converted to team role scores using the equations and norm tables developed
in conjunction with Belbin and published by ASE, a division of NFER-Nelson Ltd.
These equations are similar but not identical to those described by Mottram (1988)
when he derived the Belbin team roles from the 1962 (Form A) version of Cattell's

Number of participants in each team 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Table I. Numbers of teams


Composition of Managers 1 3 9 11 4 3 0
participating teams Non-managers 0 1 3 8 5 5 2
16PF questionnaire (Belbin, 1981, p. 170). The role of specialist cannot be accessed Belbin's
through personality questionnaires and was, therefore, not included in this team role
investigation. Univariate analyses of variance was performed on the team role theory
scores. The fixed factors were taken as the team role types and the managerial
levels; there were eight team role types and two managerial levels, managers and
non-managers. The dependent variable was the team role score. Team role sten
scores of 4 or less, besides representing a small proportion of the group, signal a 17
very weak manifestation of a given team role, highly likely to be ``invisible'' for all
practical purposes in the context of team work. Indeed, Senior (1998) noted that
within the Belbin Associates ``Interplace'' computer programme, which gives
normalised team role scores between 0 and 100, Belbin advises that scores below
30 indicate roles to be avoided. On the strength of this, sten scores of less than 5
were excluded from the analyses. However, it may be argued that the selection of
the criterion of less than 5 is quite arbitrary, and it would not be unreasonable to
suggest that scores of less that 6, or even 7 or less, should be excluded from the
analyses. Two further analyses of variance were performed, therefore: one
excluding scores of less than 6, the other excluding scores less than 7. As sten
scores of 7 or more are highly unlikely to be ``invisible'' in the team context no
further analyses of variance were performed with the exception, for the sake of
completeness, of an analysis of all the team role scores, i.e. one which did not
exclude the low scores.

Team exercise.
``Toxic Waste'', a commercially available team working exercise obtained
from Chadwick Rees Consultancy Ltd, UK, is a business game developed
specifically to allow various aspects of team-working styles and behaviours
to emerge. Not only does it not require specialised business or technical
knowledge, but it also imposes few rules or any hierarchy on the team prior
to the start of the exercise. That no specialised business or technical
knowledge was required in the exercise removed the need to consider the
Belbin team role of specialist. The exercise, which has no time limit, usually
takes about three hours to complete. In advance of conducting the
investigation, a trial run of ``Toxic Waste'' was made with a team
comprising volunteers drawn from university staff and students. From the
lessons learned from the trial a minor modification was made to the exercise
which helped bring out the characteristics of the least assertive or involved
team member. The modification to the ``Toxic Waste'' exercise was nothing
other than addition of the requirement that the team produce a tender for the
contract to collect the waste. Each of the 55 teams were assembled at
separate times and, having first completed the 16PF personality
questionnaire, participated in the modified form of ``Toxic Waste''. All
decisions in the exercise had financial consequences which enabled the final
performance of each team to be assessed by a profit or loss figure. An
independent samples test was performed on these results to compare the
performances of the managerial and non-managerial teams.
Journal of Results
Managerial Mean and standard deviation data for the Belbin team role scores for subjects
Psychology grouped into the categories of managers and non-managers are shown in
Table II. Also included in Table II are the frequencies of cases where the Belbin
17,1 team role score is 5, 6, 7 and 7 or more. The univariate analysis of variance on the
Belbin team role scores, not excluding the low values, revealed a higher order
18 effect, that is, the team role type and managerial level are dependent on one
another. The analysis of variance was repeated, each time excluding increasing
numbers of low value team role scores. When team role scores of zero to four were
excluded from the analysis the higher order effect disappeared. Table III shows the
variance estimates calculated for the team roles scores of 5 or greater.
The performance of the teams in the ``Toxic Waste'' exercise were compared.
The performances of the managers' teams were not significantly different from
those of the non-managers, as shown by a t-test for the equality of means:
t (53) = 0.068, p = 0.95.

Team rolesa
CF CO IM ME RI PL SH TW

Managers (n = 178)
Mean 5.12 6.06 5.42 4.46 5.44 6.57 6.02 6.26
SD 1.98 1.98 1.94 2.15 1.82 2.13 1.84 1.87
No. of cases, score  8 20 41 24 15 67 24 36 43
No. of cases, score  7 45 82 55 33 97 44 60 84
No. of cases, score  6 78 111 99 57 130 82 111 22
No. of cases, score  5 111 136 125 88 148 130 144 148
Non-managers (n = 160)
Mean 5.24 5.97 5.98 4.79 4.93 6.14 5.58 5.93
SD 1.98 1.99 1.85 2.07 2.01 1.97 1.73 1.94
Table II. No. of cases, score  8 21 36 32 16 43 18 21 37
Mean, standard No. of cases, score  7 37 68 71 31 71 33 46 58
deviations and some No. of cases, score  6 75 99 100 57 105 57 84 86
frequencies of team No. of cases, score  5 101 127 129 87 125 93 121 121
role scores for
managers and non- Notes: a CF = completer finisher, CO = co-ordinator, IM = implementer, ME = monitor
managers evaluator, PL = plant, RI = resource investigator, SH = shaper, TW = team worker.

Sum of Degrees of Variance


Source squares freedom estimate F Significance

Team role 144.2 7 20.60 11.42 0.000


Table III. Managerial level 2.92 1 2.93 1.62 0.203
Variance estimates of Team role X managerial level 17.61 7 2.51 1.40 0.203
team roles scores  5 Residual 3,459.01 1,918 0.86
Discussion Belbin's
The mean and standard deviation data for the managers' mean team role scores team role
obtained in this investigation were compared with the equivalent data reported by
Dulewicz (1995) who also had employed a sample drawn only from the ranks of theory
middle managers. With the exception of the shaper role, where Dulewicz's (1995)
sample showed a significantly lower mean score for the shaper role than did ours,
the two samples were almost identical in regard to the values for both means and 19
standard deviations over all roles. The close parallel between the two sets of data
supports the belief that the volunteers used in this investigation are not an
anomalous group and should, therefore, lend weight to the conclusions.
The presence of the higher order effect between team role and managerial
level which was noted above was deemed spurious. As stated earlier, several
analyses of variance were performed using team role scores greater than or
equal to 5. The same pattern of significances was shown in the two analyses of
variance of team roles scores where only scores greater than or equal to 6, and
then 7, were employed. On the basis of these analyses it is proposed that Table
III, which contains the variance estimates for the analysis performed using
team roles of scores greater than or equal to 5 represents the true relationship
between team role scores and managerial level. These results, when coupled
with an insignificant difference in team performance between managerial and
non-managerial teams, as demonstrated by the outcome of the ``Toxic Waste''
exercise, clearly points to the possibility that Belbin's team role theory may
well be applicable to non-managerial teams.
However, the enquiry reported in this paper does not conform to the ideal
experiment in which both managerial and non-managerial teams are
arranged into ``ideal'' and ``non-ideal'' Belbin teams in a manner akin to the
original experimental work performed by Belbin and his co-workers at
Henley. The extent to which such ``engineering'' of team composition would
be acceptable to mature managerial and non-managerial volunteers is
doubtful, particularly in view of the greater understanding of team
structure and dynamics found throughout the working world today as
compared to the time 25 years ago when Belbin conducted his initial
experiments. Volunteers now are likely to be familiar with the propositions
which the investigator is testing, a circumstance bound to influence
behaviour and confound the result. Although the random assignment of
individuals to teams of varying sizes in this enquiry does not match an
experiment with ``ideal'' and ``non-ideal'' Belbin teams composed of non-
managers, it does give some hope that the problem of volunteers knowing
what the investigator is looking for and consequently moderating their
behaviour to help or frustrate the enquiry has been avoided.
A number of years ago one of the authors (Macrosson), when working as a
factory manager, was cautioned by a senior colleague, ``You're only as good as
your foreman, son, and `dinna' forget it!'' These words still echo and provide a
counterpoint to the flood of advice, some of it contradictory, contained in the
literature emphasising the significance of the CEO or MD and his/her
colleagues on the board of directors. The truth is that the foreman and his
leading hands are daily faced with decisions. Each of their decisions may not
Journal of individually have the cash significance of the decisions taken in a board room,
Managerial but cumulatively they have a profound effect on the wellbeing of the
organization. The literature on senior management is conspicuously silent in
Psychology this area. Decision making, even at foreman level, involves the same process as
17,1 at higher levels in the organization. This result of this investigation should
encourage organizations to apply the Belbin theory at their lower levels,
20 hopefully achieving greater corporate effectiveness through the assembly of
better structured teams.

References
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private sector? An examination of team role preferences'', Journal of Managerial
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London.
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