Designing Creative High Power Teams and Organizations

CHAPTER 4

Team Design with Roles

The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it’s a completely random process.

—Meryl Streep, Actor

The Power of Team Roles

The roles we play have a huge impact on who we are and what we do. The beauty of roles is that they are voluntary and adopted, not given and static. Biddle argues that people “….are members of social positions and hold expectations for their own behaviors and those of other persons” (Biddle 1986, abstract). Roles can be what we want them to be.

Let’s explore the key roles necessary for high performance teams working to produce innovation for their organizations. Organizational roles break into three primary functions:

• Creating and building ...