Team Role and Style Analysis

Strong leadership teams are created when roles and styles complement each other – not when everyone looks the same.

Effective leadership is not just about competences, but about balance between structure, execution, relationships and innovation.

Team Role and Style Analysis

– Create stronger and more balanced leadership teams

In a world where leadership is becoming increasingly complex, strong leadership teams are crucial to an organisation’s success. But what makes an effective leadership team? It’s not just about skills and experience – it’s about how leaders complement each other, collaborate and manage their differences in practice.

The Team Role and Style Analysis gives you a clear overview of how your leadership team functions today and where there is potential for development. The analysis creates awareness of how team members naturally contribute through their functional roles and personal styles and how this affects decisions, communication and the overall team dynamic.

Why is it important to understand roles and styles in a leadership team?

Leadership teams face constant demands to deliver results, create engagement, ensure structure and drive development. At the same time, differences in approach can lead to internal tensions, inefficient decision-making processes or an imbalance between daily operations and strategic development.

When we understand our own and others’ roles and styles, we achieve:

  • More effective leadership teams – Avoid overlaps, imbalances and blind spots in team work.
  • Better collaboration and communication – Leaders who understand each other’s strengths and challenges work better together.
  • Increased decision-making power – Teams with clearly defined roles make faster and more informed decisions.
  • More motivated leaders – When leaders work in roles that match their preferences, they thrive and create more value.

In short: A strong leadership team is not about gathering the best individuals, but about creating the best possible interaction between team members.

What is the Team Role and Style Analysis?

The Team Role and Style Analysis is a further development of our previous team analyses and provides an in-depth understanding of how leaders balance between:

  • Functional roles – What responsibilities do they naturally take on in the team?
  • Personal styles – How do they prefer to work and make decisions?

By combining these two dimensions, the analysis ensures that we understand both the structure the leader creates in the team and the personal preference that drives their behaviour.

Why use the Team Role and Style Analysis?

  • Optimise collaboration in the leadership team – Create awareness of how roles and styles complement or challenge each other.
  • Understand team strengths and blind spots – Identify where the team has strong competences and where development may be needed.
  • Improve decision-making processes – Learn how differences in working styles affect execution and strategic thinking.
  • Support development and coaching – Help leaders develop their style and optimise their role in the team.

How does the analysis work?

Team Role and Style Analysis divides team dynamics into a number of roles and styles:

Functional Roles
(What leaders do)

  • The Coordinator – Creates structure, planning and overview.
  • The Organiser – Focuses on efficiency, execution and optimisation.
  • The Motivator – Creates engagement, relationships and psychological safety.
  • The Change Maker – Thinks strategically, challenges the status quo and drives innovation.

Personlige Stile
(Hvordan lederne arbejder)

  • The Specialist – Seeks professional immersion and expertise.
  • The Driver – Is results-orientated and focused on drive.
  • The Idea Creator – Brings innovation, new thinking and experimentation.
  • The Mentor – Focuses on relationships, support and team well-being.

Research corner

IPA Team Roles Analysis er en videreudvikling af IPA Nordics oprindelige ideer og modeller omkring begrebet Role and Style.

Udviklingsarbejdet med denne nye udgave blev udført i 2021 og 2022 som en del af IPA Nordics bestræbelser på at udvikle og tilpasse vores analyser til de forandringer, der sker i og omkring os.

In relation to the traditions surrounding the use of person-centred analyses in working life, IPA Nordic is based on the part of psychology known as Integrative Psychology. Integrative Psychology works with putting personality psychology into perspective and summarising it in a field model that captures the approaches and possibilities we have for creating theories and empirical data about the personality. This is the prerequisite for us to be able to operationalise the phenomenon of personality through analyses and measurements.

With the IPA Analysis, IPA Nordic has developed a “classic” personality model and associated measuring instrument that registers the part of the personality that figuratively appears as the “tip of the iceberg”. These analyses are based on a systematic registration of our behaviour and the patterns in this behaviour that can be conceptualised as personality traits. This behaviourist tradition is well-founded and well-documented with an almost scientific precision.

Now, in terms of Integrative Psychology’s field theory, we’ve reached a point where we’re digging a little deeper into the personality, working with our personal preferences in terms of taking on different roles and practicing different personal styles in our work life.

Our preferences, and thus our preferred roles and styles, are primarily based on our motive systems. So, we can draw a fairly clear connection between our motives and our preferred roles. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

In a broad sense, we can say that our preferred roles and styles are a product of our personality (including motives) combined with the learning and experience we’ve acquired throughout our work and life. We are attracted and motivated by certain tasks, and over time we develop a certain focus in relation to our perception of the behavior that is most appropriate and effective in relation to the tasks at hand.

Over time, we develop a relatively repetitive pattern in the way we solve problems and we are attracted to certain types of tasks and functions. It is this repetitive pattern in our behavior that enables us to definitionally create concepts and models that can register a person’s roles and styles as something that is stable over time and can be meaningfully measured.

Of course, there is a fairly clear correlation between a person’s preferred roles and personal style, which is reflected in the team roles they take on. A person with a given motivational system, and thus personal preferences, will gravitate towards taking on certain functions in the team as it gives him or her the highest level of satisfaction.

The role concept is developed on the basis of a more instrumental assessment of the FUNCTIONS in the team (and in the company) that should be performed in order for the team to perform optimally. Thus, the role concept in relation to the individual is somewhat external but still very present, as reality unfolds in such a way that it is obvious that someone must take care of certain tasks in order for the whole to function satisfactorily. Our preferred roles are primarily based on the learning and experience we have acquired throughout our working lives.

The concept of style, on the other hand, is directly linked to you and your individual and personal preferences, and your personal style is therefore unique to you. Your style is fundamentally directly linked to your personality, i.e. your behavior and motives. We capture this in the IPA Teamroles.

When we operationalize our theoretical model, we distinguish between the functional approach, which defines the more concrete roles, and the personal approach, which defines the more concrete personal preferences and styles.

Which tasks do I spend the most time on?

What do I value most in my job?

What do I notice most in my department?

Which function is the most important?

Who do I like/dislike working with the most?

What is my attitude towards change/conflict?

What is most important for a company’s success?

How do we improve our performance?

What do I value most in my colleagues?

What do I like to spend my time on?

In which situations do I feel most comfortable?

How do I like to make my decisions?

Where do I excel the most?

How do I evaluate myself and my performance?

How do I see myself at my core?

How do I want others to perceive me?

Who would I prefer to hire in my department?

Where am I most critical of my surroundings?

What mistakes do I typically crack down on?

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