Who knew tabletop roleplaying can teach you about Belbin’s team roles?

Just before Christmas (2025) we gathered for our traditional Thriv Xmas party. This time on the menu was a custom made tabletop role-playing game written together with Pasi Seppänen from Pasi’s Fantastic Hobbies. As we played along, different roles of the players started to emerge.

The game

First, what is tabletop role-playing? It is a game played with a group of people and dice. There is no “board” on the table like in boardgames, the idea is to play through a story told by the game master. Roleplaying became big after 1974, when Dungeons and Dragons, for many probably the most known game, was invented.

Our game was not a fantasy game, but an international mission to break up a cartel in 1987. With six different scenarios in different cities, we got to immerse ourselves into the character of a detective or an agent, and try to achieve our goal.

For many of us, this was the first time trying something like this. But as in all group activities, someone or maybe a few someones became the leaders, one the jokester, one the more quiet thinker and analyser, one who had the best ideas and so on. The playing, the trying to succeed with the dice (rolling 6 makes you succeed in whatever you’re trying), figuring out all the characters strengths together, communicating with each other and agreeing on an action made us think of team roles at work.

Belbin’s team roles

There are many ways to categorise personality traits or different behaviours in a team. One famous way is Belbin team roles. Dr Meredith Belbin was a British researcher and management consultant who created a model in 1981 with nine key roles for efficient team work. His idea was that a diverse set of roles would help companies create balanced teams and better collaboration.

Those roles could be arranged into three groups:

• Social: Resource Investigator, Teamworker, Co-ordinator
• Thinking: Plant, Monitor Evaluator, Specialist
• Action: Shaper, Implementer, Completer Finisher

As the names of both the groups and roles suggest, some people tend to be the social ones, whether they are enthusiastically sharing new ideas with the team, using diplomacy to avoid friction or coordinating and delegating work appropriately. On the thinking side, people rather solve problems, think of different options and strategies, and bring knowledge of a certain area or specialty. Action or task roles make sure the team is moving forward, implements plans and makes sure the work is free from errors.

Easy to spot, harder to choose

As probably in many groups, also in our game it was easy to find these characteristics between the players. A happy person with a lot of ideas, but maybe not so much practical thinking behind (Resource Investigator), someone who really dove into the character and gave inspiring thoughts from their speciality (Specialist), one that was very preoccupied with their own great idea (Plant) and the one who tried to keep the team focused and take at least some action (Implementer).

The roles shaped very naturally due to the people’s personalities, the harder part was to make things work together. Whose idea to choose acting upon or create subgroups to act on multiple things at the same time? Who makes this decision? Thankfully our group’s Implementer had the charisma to bring everyone together and a good compromise was made.

So, we can definitely agree with Belbin’s thought that: “Simply putting together a number of people and expecting them to work as a team is not enough." However, his research also suggests that all the nine roles are important. Of course, people are usually more than just one set of behaviours and in different situations many of us are more than just one of these roles. A question that still arises: If the company’s number of people in a team is limited to under nine, which of these roles make the best combination?

Based on the game experience, a team needs characteristics from all groups: social people who keep the group together, thinkers who create logical ideas and action driven implementers. One interesting topic is also the actual leader - are they part of the nine roles or a separate one? Or can a leader emerge from any of the roles? In the game setting, the game master could be seen as the leader of the team, however they were more of a facilitator than an actual decision maker.

All in all, Belbin’s model gives some food for thought in terms of what kind of characteristics work well together and what is potentially needed in order to be innovative or to get things done. In practice, probably even just a few people can have the necessary traits to make the team work.

Realised that you’re missing someone from your team to make it even more efficient? Let us help!