Personality and preferred team roles

You will probably be familiar with the idea of personality types, and the pages on yourself (the PI) will go into this in some detail and describe ways of looking into this. What is perhaps less widely understood is that people will have ways of working in teams that they are more or less comfortable with.

There are two key points that emerge from this:

• as Adair points out, you have to manage both individuals and teams and they are not separate; individuals talk to other individuals. So as you read the material in these pages, try and recognise the possible interactions between your behaviours to people as individuals and as team members
• effective teams bring together people with different preferred ways of working, so a team doesn't just need an appropriate mixture of knowledge, experience and skills; it also needs people who are oriented towards action, people who can be cerebral, and others oriented towards people. This has important messages for your recruitment and development processes.

Assessing the balance and composition of the team

Ideally, the balance and composition of the team in terms of skills, expertise and other contributions will be appropriate for the achievement of the team's objectives, ie for the particular research goal the team is working towards. The research team leader needs to be confident that team members have, or can develop, the necessary skills and knowledge for the research in hand; having an understanding of the preferred ‘team roles', the characteristic and expected social behaviour, of individual team members, including the team leader, will help ensure that the team performs effectively together.

Using team role or individual profiling tools can offer insights into building and maintaining an effective team, but team role analysis is most useful if all members evaluate their own and others' preferred roles, whichever tools are chosen.

There are a number of team role and individual profile tools available and your institution's staff development department or equivalent may have registered practitioners in one or more of these who can help you and your team understand your preferred team roles or working styles.

Team diversity: your research team

In the 1970s, Meredith Belbin and colleagues at the Henley Management College identified nine team roles, based on long-term psychometric tests and studies of business teams. Belbin defined team roles as "a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way". The resulting role definitions fall into three categories, each with strengths and allowable weaknesses, and have been used widely in practice for team development in the intervening decades. Further research by Belbin has led to the addition of a tenth ‘Specialist' role in recent years.

Task 1 Read through Belbin's team role definitions - what functions might each of Belbin's team roles play in a research team context? Are there any other team roles in a research context? Are there any of Belbin's roles that play little part in a research team?

Task 2 Think about your own research team: compare each member's strengths and weaknesses (including yourself). Is there anything vital missing from your own team? Are there prevalent characteristics that many team members share?

You may also find the page on competence, commitment and consciousness useful when considering individuals in your team.