The Belbin Self Perception Inventory (SPI), developed by Dr Meredith Belbin, is a self-assessment that is designed to help people understand their role and behaviour in a team setting. This makes it a behavioural test and not a personality one. The SPI has several statements about a person’s behaviour in a team, to which you distribute points according to how well they describe you. By transposing these points you can then find out which team roles best represent you. Nine types of team behaviour are being identified by the SPI: Completer Finisher, Implementer, Shaper, Coordinator, Resource Investigator, Teamworker, Monitor Evaluator, Plant, and Specialist. Dr Belbin defines a team role as “A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way”. Each role is essential to a successful team and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
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The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS), developed by Dr David Keirsey, is a self-assessment, which is widely used to better understand one’s personality. The KTS is a questionnaire which is comprised by 70 binary questions about the way one thinks and behaves. The result that emerges can be one of four basic temperaments (Artisan, Guardian, Rational, Idealist), which are furthermore divided to 16 personality profiles. Keirsey based his work on the studies of Hippocrates and Plato and evolved their definition of temperaments. Keirsey defines a temperament as “a configuration of personality traits, such as habits of communication, patterns of action, and sets of characteristic attitudes, values, and talents”.
The team roles that best describe me, according to the results I got from taking the SPI assessment, are Coordinator (19 points) and Shaper (15 points). A coordinator, also known as chairman, is usually the leader of a team. This actually reflects me very well, as it is true that I try to have a leading position in the teams that I belong to. Of course this is the case when I have an adequate knowledge of the content of the work to be done and of the challenges that the team will probably face. But even in cases that I am not familiar with the setting of the work, I will try to assume the leading position if I detect that there is no other member confident enough to lead the team. Then I will try to detect what are the skills and knowledge that each person can contribute to the team, in order to find the best possible way to take advantage of these assets. The next step is to reduce the size of the task at hand by dividing it to smaller tasks and then delegate those to the members of the team that are most suitable to do them effectively. During the process of working, I try to stimulate and guide the other members in order to do the work the way I believe is better. When there is a lot of pressure, I might act too bossy and talk to others too aggressively. I also tend to stick to my opinion if I absolutely believe that it is the correct one, even if it might be a minority among others. The above behaviour has many common traits with the descriptions of Coordinators and Shapers.
My personality profile, according to my KTS results, is best described by the Supervisor role (ESTJ), a subtype of the Guardian temperament. I got the same result of ESTJ by taking the KTS test with two different sets of questions, which shows that it has consistent results if you respond to the questions in the way that best describes your thoughts and usual pattern of actions. ESTJ is an acronym for extraverted, sensing, thinking and judging. These are indeed qualities that I believe describe my personality quite accurately. I am usually an extrovert person, meaning that I take joy socializing and interacting with people. This is something that fuels my batteries and gives me energy to go on, in contrast with introvert people. Furthermore, I am a ‘matter of fact’ person and I tend to be concerned mostly with practical matters. That means that I am more concrete than abstract, thus preferring Sensing to intuition. Another trait of my personality is that I act logically and based on hard evidence and previous experience on similar situations, rather than using experimental methods. This preference of objective factors rather than other criteria explains the Thinking over Feeling. Moving on, I prefer planning and having control over activities that concern me, trying to avoid unpredictability. This is displayed by the Judgment factor being over Perception.
Supervisors (also known as Administrators) “are highly social and community-minded, with many rising to positions of responsibility in their civic groups”, according to Keirsey. That means that Supervisors tend to have leadership roles in their teams, which directly relates to the description of Coordinator. The social factor that appears in the definition of Supervisors can be seen in the definitions of Coordinator and Shaper in that they guide and talk to the other members of the team, assigning them tasks and giving them instructions on how to complete them. Therefore these similarities of the tests results give credit to the consistency of the tests.
I will now try to identify patterns of behaviour matching the above descriptions that I demonstrated during the earthquake case study. The first thing that comes to mind observing the earthquake case marks is that I was the most talkative person in the group, though not always actually helping with the resolution of the task. This is in line with the social nature of Supervisors Guardians as described before. I was also trying to explain the validity of my opinion logically, analysing my process of thinking, which represents the concrete behaviour of Supervisors. Furthermore, there was a lot of “shaping” going on from my part, where I tried to align the rest of the team members with my beliefs about what should be the solution to the problem. At the end, this course of action actually led to the team’s solution being very close to my personal solution. This uncovers the fact that I was trying to dominate the group and make them agree to my way of thinking. These actions match those from the description of the Coordinator and Shaper team roles.
Much discussion has been made about the accuracy and validity of these psychometric and behavioural tests. Aritzeta, Swailes, & Senior (2007) have argued that some of the team roles are not defined properly and are not easily differentiated. Several research groups also argued that there is no need for nine types of profiles in the SPI, but that only five roles are more suitable to represent the distinct types of behaviour in a team.
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Another major concern is the fact that these are self assessments, therefore limiting the accuracy of the results to the extent of how accurately the answers you gave describe your behaviour. If you have difficulty in understanding a question, or you believe that no answer describes you well enough, then this will be probably reflected on the final results. It is much better if these tests are also accompanied by observers’ assessments of your behaviour, so that you can have a closer to reality image of your personality.
Putting aside the issues described above, I believe that these tests gave quite accurate results concerning my personality and behaviour. There were not any major conflicts between the results of the two assessments. Most of the points mentioned in the profiles descriptions are matching my usual patterns of action. I can relate to most of points mentioned when thinking about myself and I can often find a suitable example from experience in teams I have been in.
These tests value is that they let you gain some insight on the way you think and act. This can help you understand what the strong points of your personality are and then try to work on them in order to improve them even more. This goes the other way too, in that you can learn about your weaknesses and try to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. This is something that already helped me a lot after doing the earthquake case study and taking these tests. Now I am very careful when being in a team that I do not act too aggressively or dominate the discussion and blocking other points of view.
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