4.6 Applying team roles in work teams

Using team roles to put teams together

Why is it important to factor in team roles when designing teams? According to Belbin (Belbin, 2010 p. 26), today's organizations tend to suffer from a so-called “cloning culture”. Managers tend to recruit or advance staff who are similar to them. Even entire organisations can have a certain culture or reputation that draws a certain kind of personality to them. The danger here is that it might become increasingly difficult to create diverse teams where the team members actually supplement each other's strengths and weaknesses. In session two we discussed the fact that  multicultural teams don´t necessarily have to be diverse, but it can be strongly beneficial to team performance. In research from consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, we learn one possible reason for this, especially in leadership teams.

Increasing the diversity of leadership teams leads to more and better innovation and improved financial performance. In both developing and developed economies, companies with above-average diversity on their leadership teams report a greater payoff from innovation and higher EBIT margins.
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For company leaders, this is a clear path to creating a more innovative organization. People with different backgrounds and experiences often see the same problem in different ways and come up with different solutions, increasing the odds that one of those solutions will be a hit. In a fast-changing business environment, such responsiveness leaves companies better positioned to adapt.
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We surveyed employees at more than 1,700 companies in eight countries (Austria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Switzerland, and the US) across a variety of industries and company sizes. (…) We looked at perceptions of diversity at the management level across six dimensions—gender, age, nation of origin (meaning employees born in a country other than the one in which the company is headquartered), career path, industry background, and education (meaning employees’ focus of study in college or graduate school). To gauge a company’s level of innovation, we looked at the percentage of total revenue from new products and services launched over the past three years.
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The biggest takeaway we found is a strong and statistically significant correlation between the diversity of management teams and overall innovation. Companies that reported above-average diversity on their management teams also reported innovation revenue that was 19 percentage points higher than that of companies with below-average leadership diversity—45% of total revenue versus just 26%.
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Not surprisingly, these organizations also reported better overall financial performance: EBIT margins that were 9 percentage points higher than those of companies with below-average diversity on their management team

Source: Lorenzo et al., 2018. How diverse leadership teams boost innovation. https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation (accessed on 10.11.2020)

As we can see, putting teams together based on their diversity is a good idea, but unfortunately it often does not come naturally to us. Let us take a look at good practices regarding the composition of teams based on the team roles we discussed.

In most cases, organisations describe certain functional roles to their staff. Each of these functional roles also come with certain requisite competencies. A general manager might need different competencies than a finance officer or a Human Resource specialist. As you have probably already noticed, the team roles we discussed are mostly defined by the competencies they inherently bring to the team. It would therefore make sense to consider which of the team role competencies would fit the expectations we have for certain functional roles. The next task will shed some light on this and provide some examples.