Resilience of people at work is crucial for organisational success. Our ongoing research continues to explores how Team Roles and team role combinations – ways people contribute in teams – relate to resilience. This report shares exciting new findings from our expanded study.
Our initial analysis with a small dataset (n=40) suggested that thinking-people role combinations demonstrated the highest resilience (averaging 82.7%), while thinking-action pairs following closely (79.9%). This early picture positioned technical roles with strong people connections as resilience champions.
Now, with an expanded dataset of professionals with Belbin profiles (n=90), we find more nuanced insights emerging, challenging our earlier conclusions and revealing new patterns about role combinations that contribute to organisational resilience.
In this expanded analysis, Resource Investigators demonstrate the highest levels of resilience (averaging 86.1%). However, we see this resilience emerge through specific role partnerships rather than broad primary role categories. The distribution of primary-secondary role combinations in our dataset shows a rich diversity, with Teamworkers (22% of participants), Resource Investigators (16%), and Shapers (11%) forming the largest primary role groups. That is interseting is to see how resilience manifests differently across various role combinations. Rather than simply identifying “resilience champions,” we see that different role pairings create distinct resilience advantages in specific dimensions.
Our expanded dataset reveals several prevalent role combinations with distinct resilience signatures:
This suggests resilience isn’t simply about having a specific primary role but is also about how primary and secondary roles complement each other to create resilience synergies. The data suggests that different combinations excel in different resilience domains, creating a more complex picture than our initial thinking-people advantage hypothesis. We are still getting to look at tertiary roles!
Our expanded dataset allowed us to examine resilience patterns across different sectors. What we note is that role-resilience patterns remain consistent regardless of industry, suggesting these are fundamental relationships rather than context-specific findings.
Beyond specific role combinations, our analysis suggests that role clarity is also important. Individuals with higher percentile scores in their top roles (>85%) showed higher resilience (averaging 84.3% compared to 72.1% for those with lower role clarity) suggesting that understanding and confidently expressing your team role strengths contributes significantly to personal and team resilience.
All in all, these updated results suggest resilience isn’t dominated by any single role but emerges through the interplay of diverse contributions.
This evolution in our understanding – from broadly favouring thinking-people combinations to recognising the complex interplay of specific role partnerships – highlights how critical ongoing research is in this field. We remain eager to expand this research further. Your participation becomes increasingly valuable as we seek to validate these patterns across more diverse contexts.
However, while these expanded findings provide valuable insights, we still have some way to go to explore several important questions:
We are particularly interested in gathering more data from:
WHICH ONE ARE YOU? PLEASE Join Our Growing Research Community – Take the survey!
This is where you come in. If you have completed a Belbin Team Role assessment, you can contribute to this growing understanding. In return, you’ll receive:
(Image: South Africa’s fynbos is a living example of how diversity of species enhances resilience : each has a distinct need and a unique role to play)