Using Belbin's leadership role to improve team effectiveness: An empirical investigation

This paper presents a controlled experiment conducted with senior software engineering students that demonstrates the utility of forming teams based on R. Meredith Belbin’s set of team roles. The overall research effort focuses on the general utility of Belbin’s roles in improving the effectiveness of teams, which can be view in two ways: performance and team viability. Performance effectiveness, which is the focus of this paper, clearly addresses a team’s productivity. To address this problem, the first phase of the total research project consists of a controlled experiment that demonstrates that teams containing leadership roles perform better than teams that do not have this role filled. In a laboratory setting, a number of teams were formed that contained a single leader; others were formed that had no leader or multiple leaders. The results of this experiment are positive; they demonstrate that indeed Belbin’s roles provide useful information to form teams. The specific conclusion of this controlled experiment is that a single leader on a team improves a team’s performance over teams having multiple leaders or no leader. In other words, as one would expect, the mean time-to-completion for the leaderless teams was significantly greater than the teams with leaders. This means that Belbin’s roles can be utilized in formation of new teams as well as in evaluation of extant teams, making certain that a team has a single leader. Both of these aspects, formation and evaluation, are extremely useful to managers of software programmers.