Project Team Success: Using Belbin Self-Perception & MBTI tools

 By Bharathi Prakash

According to Belbin ( 1993), “The more you understand how / why people act the way they do and the more you are able to align them to your goals the more successful you will be.” Team role is a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way. It is a pattern of behaviour that characterizes one person’s behaviour in a team process. It is important to identify the roles that the team member possesses in order to improve the team effectiveness. Teams having a balance of personality types perform better than those with duplicated personalities.

By way of analyzing this approach to project success, I will use three theories based on project teams, team roles & personality traits. Williams (2002) argues the importance of project teams in obtaining the required objectives of the project. Next this article will explore the nature, size, composition & lifecycle of the project teams along with the challenges faced by them in successfully completing the project. Identification of team roles of the individual team members by using Belbin’s self perception inventory and identifying personality traits by Myers & Briggs type indicator helps the project teams to mainly improve the interaction within the teams. This study will also show that there are critical acclaims of these tools in practice. Before I end this discussion, I will also endeavor to identify the relation between team roles and team performance.

PROJECT TEAM

Williams (2002) showed that creating effective teams is one of the main factors for project success. A Team possesses basic characteristics that are inferred from his theory; teams have a common goal or objective, teams work together to achieve those objectives, each team member has  different defined roles and each team member is expert in at least one field relevant to the project. Team size and team members are allocated based on the demands of each project. Small teams involve less than 5 project members by which their cooperation is comfortable but involves less idea sharing. Large project teams give different views which lead to creativity but may be ineffective to perform a given task. Williams (2002) points out that teams normally go through different stages during the lifecycle of the project. These stages are; the forming stage- which involves building the team needed for the project, the storming stage- which involves team members expressing individual views that may contradict with one another, the norming stage- involving acceptance of other team members’ views, the performing stage- involves team members who have started to work and lastly, the adjourning stage which shows completion of the project by teams.

However project teams face many challenges and problems during the project life cycle. The root cause for many problems arises due to lack of interaction within the team members. To decrease the communication gap, it is necessary to understand Belbin’s team role theory and its contribution to success of the project.

Belbin’s team role theory

Belbin (1993) came up with a theory on the roles of individual team members- which states that every team member is unique and possesses unique behaviour which might affect the performance of the project as a whole. Belbin applied the self perception inventory questionnaire to his research in order to identify team roles. He found nine different roles with its unique characteristics that are shown below in Table 1.

  

Table 1: Team roles and characteristics

Sl.no	Team roles	Strengths	Weaknesses
1	Coordinator	Knows the team and enables agreement in the team.	Runs the risk to decide hastily and no marked creative power.
2	Shaper	Demanding, dynamic and outgoing. Highly productive under stress conditions, stimulates actions & progress and strong influence on decisions.	Exerts pressure on others, often pushing and provocative.
3	Plant	Highly imaginative with intelligence, inspires the environment, individualistic, unorthodox and serious minded.	Sometimes lacking relevance for reality or practice orientation
4	Specialist	Critical thinking ability, objective mind, analyses problems and evaluates ideas.	Hypercritical, likes disputes, serious.
5	Implementer	Conservative, dutiful and organized. Carries out agreed plans systematically and effectively make clear and realistic plans.	Lack of flexibility, unresponsiveness to new ideas that remains unproven.
6	Resource investigator	Extroverted, creating external contacts that may be useful to team, exploring on ideas, resources and developing team objective from outside the group.	Over enthusiastic, easily involved in discussions.
7	Completer	Forces perception and 100% execution of tasks, protects team from mistakes, Focus on guidelines, standards, schedules.	Hinders progress because of over anxiety and intolerant.
8	Monitor – evaluator	Accurately judging, strategic oriented, researches all options.	Sometimes forget to include details.
9	Team worker	Socially oriented, supports team members and team communication, forces team spirits and fairness.	Lack of decisiveness, avoids friction and avoids competition.

 Source: Inferred from Belbin (1993)

As seen from the table, every team role has strengths and weaknesses. Understanding each team role plays a vital role in making the teams. High performing teams utilize all combinations of team roles in order to increase the team effectiveness. On the other hand a team role can be compensated for non availability of individual team roles that are shown below in Table 2. However this theory faced critical acclaims from Furnham and his coworkers. They explained that individuals normally self exaggerate themselves while solving the self perception inventory which leads to false results and with restricted choice given in the questionnaire the problem gets diminished.

Table 2: Team roles and their compensation.

Sl.no	Team roles	Compensated by
1	Coordinator	Nominate team member, decisions can be taken by rotating team members.
2	Shaper	Substitute by other team members who can make regular process check using checklists.
3	Plant	Nominate team members who conduct brainstorming, mind mapping sessions.
4	Specialist	Using finisher, including other department members.
5	Monitor – evaluator	Using team worker
6	Implementer	Splitting the work and by outsourcing
7	Resource Investigator	Conducting regular meetings, social events, assigning roles for each team member and rewarding.
8	Completer	Assigning clear goals for thinker or shaper along with company man may help.
9	Team worker	Substituting with coordinator, employ team member with social skills.

Source: Inferred from Belbin (1993)

relevant tools

A tool designed by Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers known as Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) can be used as an effective tool for identifying the personalities of individuals which can help project team obtain full awareness of their team member behaviours. This indicator focuses on four personality types and those four types are again divided into two sides. This tool focuses on how individuals draw energy, their view towards information gathering & how they arrange surroundings. The personality types by this method are shown below in Table 3. Research suggests that the teams may increase effectiveness when there exists a balance of these personalities.

Table3: MBTI personality types

Extrovert – E	Introvert – I
Approachable, open minded, takes initiatives for discussion.	Reserved, thinker, focus on details on own experience.
Sensing – S	Intuition – N
Oriented towards reality, facts based, focus on what is real and actual.	Oriented towards future possibilities, creative, clarifies ideas before enacting.
Thinking – T	Feeling – F
Logical oriented, structured way	Harmony, empathy, emotional.
Judging – J	Perceiving - P
Eager to know in advance, takes early decisions.	Living in the present, situational decisions.

Source: Inferred from Eric chong (2007)

Analyzing the Belbin’s team role self perception inventory- on one hand-  shows that team roles play important role in developing the project teams. Also Myers- Briggs type indicator helps the project manager to find the behaviour of teams and accordingly place them in relevant projects. But both these theories faced critical acclaims showing the difficulties faced by project teams to enact these tools in reality. Hence more research is required in establishing project team role characteristics and team preferences, along with their relationships with regards to team effectiveness.

NUTSHELL:

We all know that in the oil and gas industry, project teams are very essential in delivering value to corporations; on rigs, in refineries and even in the downstream sector. In this article, Prakash has attempted to show the relation between individual team roles and team preferences which increase the effectiveness of project teams. By analysing Belbin’s team role theory, he feels team preferences should be chosen carefully in order to get maximum effectiveness from team members. His research also shows that MBTI (Myers-Briggs type indicator) tool can also be used to find the behaviours of team members which in turn can be used to complete the project successfully. To view Prakash's professional profile and for more information on this article please click here: -->