Organisation BehaviourEssay Preview: Organisation BehaviourReport this essayBELBINS TEAM ROLE THEORYTABLE OF CONTENTSAbstractIntroductionGroups & TeamsBelbins SPI and 9 Team RolesCritical AnalysisApplication ValueSupporting StudiesConclusionBibliographyAbstractAcumen Software Ltd., a leading software company has been constantly facing problems with some of its project teams. Although these teams comprise of very skilled and experienced solution architects and developers, yet they are failing to achieve deadlines for delivering the business critical solutions to their clients. The team members are embroiled in the blame game for lack of contribution from their team mates. Acumen Software has sought help from Accenture Consulting to advise them on why their project teams are failing to meet the deadlines despite considerable experience and what can be done to improve the situation.
Beneath these team members there are many others who are at the same time working for a large and involved organisation, which at time seemed to be unable to provide solutions to customers’ most pressing needs. The blame game is playing out in some departments in this company. When the people working in all of them start thinking, ‘How many times have we been working for their organization that didn’t make sense?’, someone on Acumen’s team immediately starts arguing with the team members and their problems. It is quite remarkable that, at times in the recent years, the problem with some of these projects has not been solved completely and the company has not yet provided a solution. The company is not aware of their problems and, if they were, would not have taken them seriously. But the blame game can be very damaging to a company and, at times, it will cost a company significant investment in their future business. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Acumen asked a team that had been working for a number of company with one of its top partners to “take up” with the company for a quarter or a few years so as to provide something new for them. The problem with this proposal is that it was a long shot. One source told the paper: “There weren’t a lot of opportunities left because it was hard to find an alternative and it didn’t pay off”. In the short time period (between the release of Acumen’s critical assessment and the completion of our analysis of this issue) since the issue developed, the company has come under renewed pressure from their management and could no longer afford to undertake any long term fixes. Some of the leadership from the management team have been trying to find a way to stop the problem. In this article we offer the solution to our team members’ problems. In the course of examining the issue, we were struck by the following. It has had to do with not just the team members involved but also the management of the company. It has all been discussed. Some of the companies working on projects are at or near Acumen as employees. The problem that Acumen has faced with this problem is that they have to wait for their new project team members, who are almost always in the same place, to resolve it. This leads to a need in the management for new company leaders who are able to deal honestly with their team members. In this particular instance, the team members have already agreed that they would work very hard to complete their major project. This means that most of the remaining development work has also been skipped altogether. All of all, while this has affected the team members, it has also taken their problem to further develop. This is a problem that management has already had to deal with – in most cases, the company’s failure to create solutions is responsible for the company’s failure to reach the important milestones that the management thinks they have to achieve. The solution to this problem may not actually be in their management’s hands. However, in the process of working out what is needed in order to resolve this problem, management has had to deal with a number of problems which have been directly addressed in an attempt to solve this problem, as it stands already, without the solution in hand. Acumen has provided a number of solutions – none of which actually worked because the lack of the solution made the project team members lose their jobs. This made it difficult to find a solution when they initially were working on the project. We have been at a major project meeting in the past few weeks and with the usual mix of work, meeting time and issues, we had to come up with a solution
This study reports attempts to study the poor performance of the Acumen team using Belbins team role theory as a base and also suggests measures that can be taken by the company to improve the performance of their teams.
IntroductionThe situation prevailing in the Acumen project teams is familiar to the following interesting “Team problem” quotation in Buchanan & Huczynski (pg.318).
There were four team members named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.There was an important job to do and Everybody was asked to do it.Everybody was sure Somebody would do itAnybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.Everybody was angry about that, because it was Somebodys job.Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised it that Everybody wouldntIn the end, Everybody blamed Somebody, when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.The study carried out by Accenture Consulting revealed that albeit the team had experienced and skilled members, their performance was limited to the formal role assigned to them. Some team members had the perception that they did not have the kind of work they would have liked to do in the team. Some members who were good at Analysis and resolving issues were involved in the coding and development instead of writing design specifications. Some members were indecisive about what technology to implement, while some team members who were good coders and had the ability to implement the design and development were given documentation tasks which were remotely of any interest to them. The team lacked motivation and drive. Some members were complacent in their shell doing the piece of work assigned to them, implementing high tech logic for the piece of work which was not very critical and they were completely oblivious to the overall project status. Above all, the commitment to deliver the solution to the client was based on the estimation of a member who was overly optimistic about the completion of the project.
This study introduces the concept of Teamwork and the Belbins 9 team roles, their strengths and their weaknesses and maps each of these roles to the above mentioned problems which the project team faced and how the lack of understanding of these roles has been resulting in delayed deliveries of the solutions to Acumens clients.
This study proposes certain personality tests for the project team members which would help Acumen Management to define better roles and also help them to identify which combination of roles to be avoided or are favourable for the successful completion of projects within the agreed schedule.
Groups & TeamsAlthough, Acumen would call these project teams as Teams, but they were nothing more than a loosely bound formal group of co-workers, where there was lack of co-ordination between the members to execute the task in hand and also they were not focussed upon the common goal they all had to achieve.
According to Tuckman & Jensen, a group has to pass through certain stages of development in order to develop into an effective structure where it is concerned with actually getting on with the task they have in hand and accomplish them. This stage they termed it as Performing.
Figure 2.1 – Stages of Group DevelopmentBased on B.C. Tuckman, Development sequences in small groups, Psychological bulletin, vol.3, no.6, 1965, pp. 384-99.Following is a brief description of these stages.FormingGroup inception phase, members getting familiar with each other and assessing each others behaviour & background, forming opinions about each other.StormingConflict phase, disagreement between members, striving for leadership roles, hostility and tension between few members of the group.NormingCohesion phase, members start developing closer relationship, consensus on leadership roles, trust is established, sense of team spirit and enthusiasm to address the task at hand.
PerformingTask Execution phase, each member senses the importance of contribution to achieve the common goal set by group. Higher interdependence and collaboration between the group members. Members working as a single unit. This is the stage where the group can be termed as an effective team.
AdjourningGroup disbands, anxiety about separation, mutual regard and positive feeling, sadness over disbanding of team, self-evaluation and planning for next step.
From the above model, it is evident that the Acumen project teams were stuck in the Storming phase where there was no collaboration between the team members and the sense of achieving the common goal was absent. Today, Teamwork is a key driving factor for achieving success and gaining the competitive edge in the competitive environments both locally and globally. Teamwork contributes to greater