Towards Team Formation Using Belbin Role Types and a Social Networks Analysis Approach

Abstract

Problems relating to team formation is common across many industrial sectors, including education, sport and general business. For Team Leaders, team member selection can be a critical challenge due to the complexity in creating a well-balanced productive unit. It is beyond manual implementation to build near optimal teams as pools of employees grow. One of the essential skills of individuals is the ability to work in a team, and it takes on greater importance in engineering workgroups, where each member must know how to collaborate with their colleagues. In this paper, we use the combination of the Belbin roles and the social network analysis approach to find the possible members of a team. We present a case study based on an undergraduate course in computer engineering, we apply the Belbin test to each student, and each student expresses his preferences to work with his classmates. With this data, similarity patterns were searched within a social network using network analysis algorithms. We compare the results of the network analysis with the groups formed by a teacher. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of project teams, from the proposed approach.