Employee acceptance of team role profiling as a management tool: A survey of a high technology manufacturing environment

The present study investigated the subject of the acceptance levels of a high technology manufacturing workforce to accept the use of a team-role model as a management tool for assignment to work teams. Manufacturing management is being pressured to find means to assign workers into work teams that will maximize the productivity results. This situation is compounded as the size of functional teams increase. There are many different models available but the Belbin Team Role Self-Perception Inventory was selected for this study. While there has been a large amount of research performed on the validity of the Belbin Team Role model, there have not been any studies on the acceptability by the workforce for use with job assignments. The assembler's level of acceptance of team role instrument was determined by using the Belbin Self-perception assessment and an online questionnaire. The personal opinions and quantitative data were collected via an online questionnaire. 70 assemblers from a Midwest Fortune 500 technology company took the online Belbin self-perception assessment and 61 (31 male and 30 female) gave their opinions by completing the researcher's survey. There was a positive correlation between those who took the online questionnaire and the level of acceptance to allow management to reassign them to teams based on their identified team role. The level of acceptance was the same between genders, various ages, and education backgrounds. Males accepted the use of the tool at a similar rate as females. The overall result is that the manufacturing workforce accepted the use of team role profiling for job assignments and career enhancing feedback.