Prof. Merlyn Michael D'souza Role-play with part-time M.U. students

Belbin identified nine useful types of contribution or team–roles. A team–role is described as a pattern of behavior, characteristic of the way in which one team member interacts with another whose performance serves to facilitate the progress of the team as a whole. A description of the evolved nine team-roles is given as follows:

1. Plant -

Creative, imaginative, unorthodox. Solves difficult problems. When posed with a difficult problem, new solutions are evolved by the employee as he discusses with his boss.

2. Resource Investigator - 

Extrovert, enthusiastic, communicative. Explores opportunities. Develops contacts.  Always looking for newer avenues to delve into when seeing that his senior colleague is in trouble and needs advice.

3. Coordinator -

Mature, confident, a good chairperson. Clarifies goals, promotes decision-making. Delegates well. Good coordinating skills at all times giving good balance of act between management and employee.

4. Shaper - 

Challenging, dynamic, thrives on pressure. Has the drive and courage to overcome obstacles. They were given an uneasy challenging task, with pressure on time. However, they thrive on pressure and perform their best.

5. Monitor -Evaluator -

Sober, strategic and discerning. Sees all options. Judges accurately. When offered two plans of adopting an insurance policy, he discerns the pros and cons of each before making the final decision.

6. Team-worker -

Co-operative, mild, perceptive and diplomatic. Listens, builds, averts friction, and calms the waters. A good team-player making all members feel comfortable when unable to face the task allocated.

7. Implementer -

Disciplined, reliable, conservative & efficient. Turns ideas into practical actions. Posed with implementation of a critical task, the members plan in a systematic and trustworthy way how to come out with brilliant results.They plan to conduct sale of insurance policies by first conducting a pilot study with a sample market area size and then go forth.

8. Completer -

Painstaking, conscientious, anxious. Searches out errors & omissions. Delivers on time. Given a problem of completing work of preparing a balance-sheet in a short span of time, the person in the role is extremely involved and completes the process ahead of time.

9. Specialist -

Single-minded, self-sharing, dedicated. Provides knowledge & skills in rare supply. Being a specialist in the knowledge of stock trading, this specialist provides all options to his boss with his devotion to work and good focus on solving the problem.

A sample video file of the specialist is depicted as below.

"TEAM-ROLE OF SPECIALIST" - ROLE-PLAY

The students enacted the above 9 role-plays and depicted team-roles in a wonderful way.  The different ideas depicted help them to relate how they are posed with situations at different times. Kudos to them for their good efforts!