The Distribution of Roles within a Group or Team - Essay Example

Module: Topic: A team is a bundling together of personalities who have come together to achieve certain roles and tasks assigned to them. It isbasically a congregation of individuals who share some common goals and work in team to generate synergies because it is impossible for them to achieve them working alone. The Belbin theory of team building states that in order to build a good team, a workplace should be assessed in great detail to look at the strength and weaknesses of individuals. The information learned at this stage can be used in selecting the right people for the right task. It will help in building good working relationship because people with the right skills will be doing the right tasks and hence will enjoy success and authority over what they do and this will in turn make them more confident and will help them achieve their targets with ease. It will also help the development of high performing teams because right people will be doing the right work. This will create positive synergies and generated output will greater than the sum of inputs by the team. It will also help build mutual trust and understanding because all the team members will know that right people are doing the right job and hence it will be easier for all team members to communicate, report any blunders and take the corrective action as a team if necessary. All of this will build a winning team which will work extremely efficiently in congregation to achieve their tasks, goals and target within the given span of time. Belbin also gave a clear definition of team members. He believed that personality hardly matters in team setting. An individual should be judged by the way he behave, contributes and interrelates with the other team members and sees them as his peer. Team working can help team members in working in the field in which they are strong in and eliminating their weak aspects by assigning some of the tasks to people who are good at one of the team member’s weakness. In other words, team work is a congregation of strengths and elimination of weaknesses. Everyone in a team can focus on the core competencies while letting other team members do the task in which one is weak in. This is an impressive utilization of the congregational strengths that a team has. It leads the team to be more efficient, productive and time efficient. As a result, many of the large organizations divide their work in projects to be completed by competent team of individuals having varied skills sets and way of think. This eliminates the problem of being stuck in tasks and all the work flows smoothly which benefits the entire organization. During research done on the topic, it was found that balance is the key in the success of a team and individual’s that are part of a team. Too much of one kind of skills may lead to a team that may not be able to operate as efficiently as a team that has varied skill sets. Hence, all kinds of skills should be given a weightage when composing a ideal team. This weightage should then be compared with the skills required in a job and team composition should not be complete until and unless the two are not in equilibrium or the sum of skills sets required in a job and sum of skill sets of a team are equal. Only then an ideal team will be formed, when both are in equality. Belbin allowed certain types of weaknesses in a team. These include people who are forgetful, people who delegate too much work leaving too little for them, people who are slow, perfectionists, bad-humored and specialist in their old fields. All of these weaknesses are accepted because there is no incompatibility in the team’s targets and all of these weaknesses are personality based and not work based. Hence, Belbin believes that these types of weaknesses in a team setting are allowable and does not make much difference as compared to work related weaknesses. The personal example that I would like to share through this essay is when I was completing a research work in a group. I encountered people of diverse personality types in that project. I was sure that all people who have reached the stage of completing the research project were excellent people and there should be no problem in completing the project. However, as it turned out I was wrong. Working in a team was far difficult then I first thought. At first I met a person who was my team mate in the project. He was sincere with the work, but was too much topic and didn’t realize the fine line between the good and bad humor. All of the other group members including me unanimously agreed that he posed hindrance to work. His humor sometimes went over the limits and girls in our group weren’t too happy with it. This created a problem in coordinating. He created an environment where no other team member was prepared to trust and for most of the part of the project we were working on our own without creating any positive synergy among ourselves. This was a big problem. Then there was another person who chose to delegate too much work to others and did little himself. This became a hurdle as many people refused to work extra for him. However, one person in our group took the responsibility of doing his leftover work, after which the problem was solved. Then there was a girl in our group who was a perfectionist. We told her several times that her perfectionism might make us miss the deadline of the work, but she insisted on being late than submitting work that did not pass her standard of quality. That became a problem as we had several sleepless nights in order to work and meet her standards of quality which were unnecessary for most part. This led us to a penalty of 5% of our marks because our work was late by several hours. Hence, it was difficult working in a team with a diverse group of people having different personality and way of thinking. It was difficult to bridge the gap between their ways of thinking, but due to some excellent team mates we were able to complete our tasks successfully. Looking at my experience I can point out several weaknesses in the Belbin’s model of team working. First of all he failed to realize that personality difference can easily become work related differences if not dealt with properly and efficiently enough. Hence, there is a need for team leaders to make sure that none of the personality difference crosses the line and start irritating the other team member. In other words, team leader should ensure that there is harmony and good working relationship between the team members, a thing that Belbin failed to realize. Another weakness in Belbin’s model is his failure to differentiate between working behavior from personal characteristics of traits of an individual. A good team work is not about one person and has to do with everyone in the team. If one member’s quality preferences are higher than other than there should be coordination between the two to bridge the gap and bring it to a level that is acceptable to both team members. Only this ways, the team can work with synergy and achieves mutual goals that the entire team has to achieve. In the end, it can be concluded that Belbin’s theory of team might be efficient, but it is not flawless. There are a number of flaws in the theory that can be corrected by modifying or upgrading the theory considering the changes in the events in the theory was originally developed and current scenario. This would lead us into building a good model of team working that is ideal and would lead the organizations and teams to success. References: Van Knippenber, A. and Ellemers, N. (1990) ‘Social identity and intergroup differentiation processes’ W. Stroebe and M. Hewstone (eds) European Review of Social Psychology, Vol. 1 Chichester: Wiley   Alcorn, S. (1989) ‘Understanding groups at work’, Personnel Journal, 66: 28-36.  Belbin, R.M (1993) Team Roles at Work. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.   Feldman, D.C. (1984) ‘The development and enforcement of group norms’, Academy of Management Review, 9, 47-53.  Hayes, N. (1997) Successful Team Man Read More