We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
from Part II - Thriving in your new job
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
You have a new job, possibly a new home and certainly new responsibilities. This is an exciting, challenging and often daunting phase of an academic career. How can you ease the transition? This is a good time to take stock of your strengths and weaknesses. What are you naturally good (or bad) at? Are what you perceive as your strengths seen as strengths or weaknesses by those who work with you? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you plan the early stages of this career phase so that you maximise your potential. In this chapter we discuss the general concept of Belbin profiles and what each classification means. More importantly, we discuss which roles within academia will come naturally to each profile and which will need more effort.
The theory
The previous chapters have emphasised the development from dependence on others to independence: how to increasingly take a lead in actions and have more responsibilities. Thus far, interacting with others has been in the background, yet scientists increasingly work in groups and sometimes in large multinational teams. To be effective in the context of a team requires an understanding of what you are naturally good at and an acceptance of the fact that some things are better left to others.
In the last century there was considerable research into effective team-working strategies. In the 1980s and 1990s Meredith Belbin, from the Henley Management School, proposed a model based on ‘team roles’ (Belbin, 1981). In his words:
The term ‘team role’ refers to a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others at work in certain distinctive ways. For practical purposes, one needs to discriminate sharply between a person’s team role and ‘functional role’, where the latter refers to the job demands that a person has been engaged to meet by supplying the requisite technical skills and operational knowledge.
This distinction between team and functional roles is helpful in the case of a conflict between a person’s natural inclinations and job requirements; it can help in renegotiating the role. While originally developed in the context of management teams, this model was subsequently shown to be more generic and valid for non-management teams (Belbin, 2003). A recent review summarises progress since the inception of the original hypothesis (Aritzeta et al., 2007).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
