17.2 Positive and Negative Team Member Roles
When a manager selects a team for a particular project, its success depends on its members filling various positive roles. There are a few standard roles that must be represented to achieve the team’s goals, but diversity is also key. Without an initiator-coordinator stepping up into a leadership position, for instance, the team will be a non-starter because team members such as the elaborator will just wait for more direction from the manager, who might be otherwise engaged. If all the team members commit to filling a leadership role, however, the group will stall from the onset with power struggles until the most dominant personality vanquishes the others. A good manager must, therefore, be a good psychologist in building a team with diverse personality types and talents. Table 17. 1 below captures some of these roles.
| Role | Actions |
|---|---|
| Initiator-coordinator | Suggests new ideas or new ways of looking at the problem |
| Elaborator | Builds on ideas and provides examples |
| Coordinator | Brings ideas, information, and suggestions together |
| Evaluator-critic | Evaluates ideas and provides constructive criticism |
| Recorder | Records ideas, examples, suggestions, and critiques |
| Comic relief | Uses humour to keep the team happy |
Table 17.1 | Positive Group Roles
Of course, each team member here contributes work irrespective of their typical roles. The groupmate who always wanted to be recorder in high school because they thought that all they had to do was jot down some notes about what other people said and did, and otherwise contributed nothing, would be a liability as a loafer in a workplace team. We must, therefore, contrast the above roles with negative roles, some of which are captured in Table 17.2 below.
| Role | Actions |
|---|---|
| Dominator | Dominates discussion so others can’t take their turn |
| Recognition seeker | Seeks attention by relating discussion to their actions |
| Special-interest pleader | Relates discussion to special interests or personal agenda |
| Blocker | Blocks attempts at consensus consistently |
| Slacker | Does little-to-no work, forcing others to pick up the slack |
| Joker or clown | Seeks attention through humour and distracting members |
Table 17.2 | Negative Group Roles (Beene & Sheats, 1948; McLean, 2005)
Whether a team member has a positive or negative effect often depends on context. Just as the class clown can provide some much-needed comic relief when the timing’s right, they can also impede productivity when they merely distract members during work periods. An initiator-coordinator gets things started and provides direction, but a dominator will put down others’ ideas, belittle their contributions, and ultimately force people to contribute little and withdraw partially or altogether.
Perhaps the worst of all roles is the slacker. If you consider a game of tug-o-war between two teams of even strength, success depends on everyone on the team pulling as hard as they would if they were in a one-on-one match. The tendency of many, however, is to slack off a little, thinking that their contribution won’t be noticed and that everyone else on the team will make up for their lack of effort. The team’s work output will be much less than the sum of its parts, however, if everyone else thinks this, too. Preventing slacker tendencies requires clearly articulating in writing the expectations for everyone’s individual contributions. With such a contract to measure individual performance, each member can be held accountable for their work and take pride in their contribution to solving all the problems that the team overcame on its road to success.