Development of a Team Role Behavior Observation Tool: Insights and Considerations for Future Research

Today’s workforce is dependent on teams. Organizations are interested in positively influencing antecedents to team effectiveness such as team composition. While many factors have been studied thoroughly concerning team composition and effectiveness, team roles have not received comparable attention. Team roles refer to groups of generalizable, goal-directed behaviors that support team performance. Current team role assessments are reliant on surveys and peer ratings. To explore avenues that would enable comparisons between survey-based measures of team roles with benchmarks of observable behavior, we developed a behavior observation tool based on a team role taxonomy known as Team Role Experience and Orientation (TREO). We present the first iteration of this tool based on our review of team role literature, results of an inter-rater reliability assessment, and discuss its potential impact concerning future research and organizational utility. More work is needed to develop a construct-valid behavioral team role assessment.