SITUATION 1 / 60 of 6 done
A new project kicks off. You're most likely to…
6 of 6 left
Suggest an unusual approach nobody has tried0
Push to set a deadline and get moving0
Make sure everyone knows who's doing what0
What team roles are, in short
A team role is the way you tend to contribute to a group: generating ideas, organising people, pushing for results, checking quality and so on. Most people have two or three roles they slip into naturally, and a few they avoid.
The idea comes from Meredith Belbin's studies of management teams in the 1970s, which found that balanced teams beat teams of individually brilliant people. Our nine roles follow the same thinking, action and people split, but the situations and role names are our own.
By What's Your IQ · Reviewed 4 Oct 2026- Format
- 6 situations; share 6 points between 3 behaviours
- Result
- 0–12 points on each of 9 roles in 3 groups
- Origin
- Belbin's team research at Henley, published 1981
- Best used for
- Spotting gaps in a team and sharing out work
TRY IT
Build a team of four
Click a seat, then pick the role that person plays best. The check below shows what the team covers and where it's likely to struggle.
ROLE FOR SEAT 1
COVERAGE
Thinking
1People
1Action
2
How, not whomatters most for team performanceResearch on what makes teams effective keeps finding that psychological safety, feeling able to speak up without being punished, matters more than the mix of personalities.3,4
1981The Apollo effect. Belbin found that teams made only of the highest-ability managers often did worse in business games, because everyone argued and nobody did the follow-through.1
1999Psychological safety. Amy Edmondson showed teams learn faster when members feel safe admitting mistakes and asking questions.3
2007 · reviewMixed evidence. A review of team-role research found the general idea useful but limited support for the exact number of roles or for questionnaire accuracy.2
2016Google's teams. Google's internal Project Aristotle reported that how team members treated each other predicted success better than who was on the team.4
- Belbin, R. M. (1981). Management teams: Why they succeed or fail. Heinemann.
- Aritzeta, A., Swailes, S., & Senior, B. (2007). Belbin's team role model: Development, validity and applications for team building. Journal of Management Studies, 44(1), 96–118.
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
- Duhigg, C. (2016, February 25). What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. The New York Times Magazine.