Team Building, Team Roles and Team Dynamics with Dr Marriott

517 Words3 Pages
Team Building, Team Roles and Team Dynamics with Dr Marriott "What is needed is not well balanced individuals; but individuals who balance well with each other." - Dr Merideth Belbin Dr David Marriott, internationally renowned corporate psychologist and expert in team and management development, shares some thoughts on the famous Belbin Model and it's relevance for teams into the next century. In my experience there are few organisations in any field of work where the major decisions are made by one person. Rather the running of any successful operation necessitates the collaboration of a team of people from different backgrounds and with unique personality and thinking styles, who interact as peers, pooling their ideas, judgement and plans. The success of their endeavours hinges on the behaviour, talents, balance and cohesion of this management team. The work of Dr Meredith Belbin is a significant contribution to our understanding of how human organisations work, and how to make them work better. Over a seven year period a team of psychologists, under his direction, assessed individual managers from all over the world. Their different personality traits, intellectual abilities and behaviour during a variety of management assignments were carefully evaluated. Results of this research showed that there are a finite number of Management Styles or Team Roles, and that these Team Roles comprise certain patterns of related behaviour which can be adopted naturally by the various personality types found in organisations. The accurate delineation of these Team Roles is critical to the study of management team effectiveness. There are two important elements in Belbin's analysis. The first is the recognition that human strengths usually bring countervailing weaknesses. The second is that some combinations of these roles have a greater probability of team
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