9. Read the following article and answer the questions.

1. Whose research has dominated theories of teamwork?

2. What did Henley College offer the researcher?

3. What did his test reveal?

The Secret of Teamwork

In offices around the world managers are constantly reminded that the team is the thing. But despite their enthusiasm for teams, until recently the way companies understood what made successful teamwork remained rooted in the 1960s. For 35 years, the ideas of Professor Meredith Belbin have ruled. Generations of managers have grown up with his theories.

Professor Belbin’s theories date back to research in 1967, when an initiative at Henley Management College presented him a rare opportunity to study teamwork in a controlled environment. Henley introduced a computer- based business game into one of its courses. The game pitted ( сводить как соперников) teams against each other, and offered Professor Belbin, then at the Industrial Training Research Unit at University College, London, his own laboratory of teamwork. It remains a benchmark ( показательный) study.

Team members conducted a series of personality and psychometric tests. From his observations, Professor Belbin discovered that certain combinations of personality types performed more successfully than others. He identified the nine archetypal roles required to make up an ideal team: the Plant- provides the team with imagination and ideas; the Co-ordinator- clarifies goals and promotes decision-making; the Shaper- is dynamic and finds ways around obstacles; the Teamworker- provides the social lubrication for the team, and so on.

10. Read the text and choose the correct options a-c. The Changing Views of What Makes Effective Teams.

Professor Peter O’Driscoll, from Kenilworth University, is an expert in the study of teams within business. He says that Professor Belbin’s categorisation of team roles is still widely used. Professor Belbin viewed the team as a whole made up of individuals, where the success of the team relies on the individual elements performing their roles. Belbin’s approach is valid because it enables people to understand themselves and others as team members. It increases the team’s overall knowledge of how the team is constructed. But Professor Peter O’Driscoll would argue that effective teamworking emerges from a combination of individual and collective competencies, or abilities.

Businessmen are all aware of teams made up of highly competent individuals that fail to perform as a team. The task is to develop teams of competent individuals to perform collectively. So, Professor Peter O’Driscoll’s research looked at which collective competencies were required to bring about effective performance. The researches looked at a variety of teams, including project teams, work groups, football teams and jazz bands.

Their study identified a number of differences between teams in terms of structure and stability. Business teams, for instance, are often ad hoc (специальный, устроенный для данной цели) creations formed to address a short-term need, whereas an orchestra or a rugby team are more stable.

But even very short-lived teams share generic characteristics with stable ones.

Professor Peter O’Driscoll’s researchers looked at jazz musicians in jam sessions (джем-сейшен - особый тип джазового мероприятия, на котором музыканты импровизируют совместно ), where individuals come together for a one-off performance. It was found out that the jazz musicians sought to establish a level of social integration.

The researches also developed a model for assessing the effectiveness of a team as a collective. The model takes into consideration the relationships between individuals- the links that hold the team together. It identifies 16 distinct competencies that are crucial to team effectiveness. These competencies are divided into four clusters, or groups, known as: enabling; resourcing; fusing and motivating.

Using the new framework, it is possible to identify where a team might be strengthened.