Team Roles at Work
R Meredith Belbin, Team Roles at Work, (Butterworth Heinemann, 2nd ed., 2010)
ISBN: 978-1-85617-8006

‘A team is not a bunch of people with job titles, but a congregation of individuals, each of whom has a role which is understood by other members. Members of a team seek out certain roles and they perform most effectively in the ones that are most natural to them.' Team Roles at Work is a follow-up to Meredith Belbin's highly successful book Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail. The nine team roles, now familiar to managers and management trainers all over the world, are explored further, adding value to the original team-role concepts. Operational strategies are laid out which provide ideas, techniques and a new range of information and advice, which can be used to the organisation’s advantage.

The application of the theory includes:

• How to manage the self in a team
• How to create working partnerships
• How to recognise potential for the 'surprise' fit
• How to encourage interdependence between members of a team
• How the team should fit into the organisation.

Team Roles at Work is a must have for any management trainers and consultants who have understood the theory and want to put it into practice.

Now fully updated for today's managers and students Team Roles at Work takes the academic background of the team roles method and offers a more practical approach with a new structure and visual aids such as tables, illustrations and graphs to ease learning. Team Roles at Work offers managers a practical guide to improving their teams within the workplace to deliver significantly better results for their company, reflecting well on them as a manager, whilst also saving them time and energy, by using each team member to their best advantage to achieve overall team goals.

Contents

• A short history of roles at work
• The qualifications mystery
• Emergence of a team-role language
• The eligibility versus suitability issue
• Coherent and incoherent role profiles
• Interpersonal chemistry in the workplace
• The management of strained relations
• A strategy for self-management
• The art of building a team
• Solo leader versus team leader
• The management of succession
• The future shape of organisation