A COMPARISON OF THE BELBIN SELF-PERCEPTION INVENTORY AND OBSERVERS ASSESSMENT SHEET AS MEASURES OF AN INDIVIDUALS TEAM ROLES

The Belbin Team Role Self-Perception Inventory (SPI) is a well-known a nd well-used measure for identifying an individual's team roles. Less well-known is Belbin's Observer's Assessment Sheet (OAS) which can als o be used by colleagues of the individual concerned or, at least, thos e who know him or her well. To assess team role this study compared th ese two different team role measures when applied to a sample of 65 me mbers of II different management teams. The results showed that only 3 5 of the 65 observer sets agreed amongst themselves about the team rol es of the individual they observed and only seven of these 35 sets sho wed good agreement between the observers' assessments and those of the individuals themselves. Positive correlations between the SPT scores and the OAS scores were found for only five of the nine team roles. Th e findings are discussed in terms of inter-rater problems and the reli ability of the instruments.