I agree that the categorisations in Salas et.al. (2005) and Kay et al. (2006) are useful competencies/behaviours within a team.  I don’t agree that all team members have to aspire to or practice all the competencies all of the time. The team leader may not want the application designer to be wasting time by simultaneously trying to exercise back-up behaviour or mutual performance monitoring.  I don’t usually like mechanistic solutions which fit people into boxes but I did find Myers-Briggs and Belbin useful in my business career.  I expect people are familiar but essentially:

• Myers Briggs methodology fits people into one of 16 personality types. Sounds crude but most people’s first reaction on reading the description of their type is ‘how on earth did they know?’.  It focuses on strengths but, as important, identifies complementary weaknesses. It helps you to accept that, if you are a good strategist/conceptual thinker you are unlikely also to be diligent at the fine detail. Hence instead of trying to hide this ‘weakness’ you strategise to accommodate it.
• Belbin identifies team skills such as ‘Resource Investigator’ and ‘Completer/Finisher’ and proposes that a good team will have a combination of such skills in its members.  Their punchline is ‘you can’t be a perfect individual but you can have a perfect team’.

Given the diverse experience of MAODE students, I think this sort of approach is relevant to team development. We can’t pick our members but we can allocate roles to relevant strengths or interests. Hence it will be appropriate not just to compare our experience but also to identify known strengths or betes noires.  We’re here to learn online education not to experiment in becoming more complete people – there’s a MOOC for that!