Team role concept and team formation in design teams in Sri Lanka

Construction is a collaborative activity which combines efforts of number of participants. Hence, teamworking in construction is inevitable. The purpose of teamworking is to exploit the benefit for the team as a whole by a particular combination of actions by team members of the team. But, if not properly managed, teams may result in process losses and inefficiencies as well. Therefore, practitioners in the industry should find ways to improve team performance. Since construction project teams consist with many sub teams such as design teams, performance of the construction industry can be improved, when team performance of sub teams are also improved. 'Team role' concept relates to team performance. Belbin's (1981, 1993) team role framework is regarded as one of the most prominent team role theory. But use of this concept in construction teams is questionable. Accordingly, this study explored consideration of team role concept in team formation in one major sub team in construction: design teams. To explore this research problem, three case studies of in-house design teams which were involved in building construction projects with separated procurement arrangement were conducted in Sri Lanka. Semi-structured interviews were used as main data collection technique. The findings revealed that individuals are assigned to design teams considering their functional roles rather than team roles and team selection is affected by several other factors such as special requirements of the project, experience of the members, qualifications required, availability of human resources, recommendations and workload. However, the study revealed implications particularly to design team selectors on how to apply team role theory in construction context.