Tuckman in his Model of Group Development provides easily identifiable stages that a groups performance can be measured against, making it useful for monitoring performance, Figure 2 shows Tuckman’s model. Ranking group performance against this scale can provide leaders with a clear understanding of how the group are functioning, allowing them to implement policies to change this if performance is unsatisfactory (Pettinger, 2007). Within organisations, the theory can be loosely applied to creating teams by grouping familiar individuals with the aim that they will reach the norming and performing stage of the model quicker. For short and simple tasks this is an extremely effective way of organising groups, due to the increased short term productivity. However there are significant issues with grouping individuals in this manner, particularly when tasks become more complex, and ultimately the model should mainly be used for monitoring the progress of groups (Pettinger, 2007).
Figure 3: Belbin’s Team Roles (PrePearl Training Development, 2019)
A more functional approach of grouping individuals is to utilise Belbin’s Team Theory (Belbin, 2017). Belbin identifies 9 key roles that must be fulfilled within a group to ensure success, the roles are summarised in Figure 3. The roles cover a wide spectrum of skills that need to be present within a group to ensure success, and becomes essential when tasks are lengthy and complex. Organisations can find the Belbin roles each individual fits through a questionnaire, and thus balanced groups can be formed covering all the roles. However, like with Fiedler’s contingency model, the theory when translated to practice can often become very impractical for organisations to implement regularly. This is largely because the organisation is constrained by the personalities of their employees, their may be an abundance of one personality type and an absence of another, the only solution is to hire externally to fill the missing roles within teams. This can result in an extensive payroll for an organisation and huge financial implications as they cannot legally dismiss employee’s if they have too many of one personality type. The importance of Belbin roles in a team became apparent for Group 1 on the first day of the outdoor management course, the group had 5 people who filled the completer finisher and implementor roles, however had no-one filling the resource investigator or monitor evaluator role, the group ran out of time an