Abstract:
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.
