Why Teams Need Better Assessment — And Why $24 Billion Says So

Every organisation investing in AI, automation, and digital transformation is discovering the same thing. The tools get more powerful. The human questions get harder. Who decides? Who adapts when the system fails? Who takes responsibility when the algorithm is wrong?

One person cannot carry that anymore. The complexity of modern organisations has outgrown individual capacity - not because individuals got weaker, but because the systems got more intricate.

This is why teamwork is no longer a management principle. It is a performance prerequisite. And it is why understanding how people work together has become one of the fastest-growing investments organisations are making.

The Market Confirms It

The global personality assessment market was valued at US$10.68 billion in 2024. By 2031, it is projected to reach US$24.31 billion - a compound annual growth rate of 12.7%, according to The Insight Partners' 2025 market study.

That is not a niche trend. That is a structural shift.

North America currently holds the largest market share. Europe is the fastest-growing region, led by the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. The European drivers are specific: organisations shifting from recruitment filtering toward development, talent optimisation, and understanding how diverse, multilingual teams actually function - what they produce together, not who sits in them.

The EU's focus on mental wellbeing and employee rights is pushing this further. Organisations increasingly need to understand what motivates people, what creates stress, and how individuals interact across different backgrounds and working styles. A traditional personality profile does not answer those questions well enough.

Any Assessment for Self-Reflection. A Different One for Teams.

Here is a distinction most organisations miss when they go looking for assessment tools.

Any serious assessment has value for self-reflection. MBTI, DISC, Big Five - these tools produce genuine insight for the individual. They describe preferences, tendencies, characteristic ways of processing and responding. For someone trying to understand themselves better, that has worth.

The question is what you are trying to solve.

If the question is "how do I understand myself better?" - almost any assessment helps.

If the question is "how do I build a team that actually works?" - the tool needs to do something different. It needs to describe not only who someone is, but what they do with other people. How they behave under pressure. What they contribute. What they leave uncovered. What happens when you put two of them together.

Personality tests were not built for that question. They profile one person at a time. The team picture has to be assembled separately, by inference. And inference, in team building, is how mismatches happen.

Why Behaviour Is the Right Language for Teams

Behaviour is practical in a way personality is not.

You cannot ask someone to stop being an introvert. You can ask them to share their analysis before the decision is made, not after. You cannot ask someone to stop being a high-tempo driver. You can ask them to hold the first idea for sixty seconds before moving to action.

Personality describes. Behaviour gives you something to work with.

Behaviour is also learnable and adaptable. People shift their behavioural contribution depending on what the team needs, who else is in the room, and what the situation demands. A good assessment captures that range - the peak contribution and the manageable contributions a person can stretch into when the team needs them.

And behaviour is observable. Your colleagues see it. They respond to it. They can give specific, concrete feedback about it - something they could never do about a personality trait, because they experience behaviour, not underlying psychology.

Personality Tests for Hiring: What They Predict and What They Miss

Recruitment is where personality testing gets used most, and where it lets teams down most often.

A personality test in hiring predicts one thing well: how the candidate describes their own preferences. That is not nothing. It is just a long way from what you need to know - how this person will behave in your team, with your people, under your kind of pressure.

This is the gap between eligibility and suitability. Eligibility is whether someone can do the job: the qualifications, the track record, the test scores. Suitability is whether they fit the team that already exists. A candidate can be eligible on paper and wrong for the room - because the team already has three people who think the same way and nobody who finishes.

Personality fit is also easy to game and easy to misread. Candidates learn what answers a hiring test rewards. And the trait that reads as a red flag in isolation - too blunt, too restless - is often the exact behaviour a too-comfortable team is missing.

The more useful question in hiring is behavioural. What does this person contribute that the team does not already have? Where will they create friction, and is it the productive kind? You answer those by looking at observed behaviour and at the shape of the team they are joining, not at a personality label produced in a vacuum.

Why Belbin - Specifically

The Belbin Team Roles framework was developed at Henley Management College in the 1970s. Built from nine years of systematic team observation. The research question was simple and hard: what actually predicts whether a team will succeed? The answer was not individual intelligence. Not technical skill. Not even experience. It was the behavioural mix within the team - the specific contributions people brought and how those fit together.

Belbin was built for teams. Not adapted for them after the fact. Built for them from the start.

That origin shows in the structure. Where most personality frameworks produce four or five categories, Belbin identifies nine distinct team contributions. Four or five categories can capture broad preference differences. Nine categories can explain why two people who share the same preference profile produce completely different outcomes in a team - because the difference sits in the behavioural detail that four categories flatten.

The nine roles are not personality types. They describe what people actually do in teams. What they contribute. What they notice. What they initiate. What they protect. The distinction matters when you are trying to design a team rather than describe an individual.

For the full nine-role framework, read Belbin Team Roles: The Practitioner's Guide to What Teams Actually Need.

The Part That Personality Assessment Cannot Reach

Most assessment tools stop at self-report. One person answers questions about themselves. The tool processes the answers and produces a profile. No external input. No other perspective.

Belbin does something the other tools do not. It adds observer assessments - structured feedback from four to six colleagues who work directly with the person. Their observations are collected separately and compared against the self-perception data. The comparison between those two sources is where the most useful information lives.

Research on more than 78,000 Belbin profiles across 30 countries found that only 17.7% of people show a coherent match between how they see themselves and how their colleagues experience them. The other 82.3% are operating on assumptions their teams do not share.

Those assumptions are where communication breakdowns sit. Where misunderstood meetings come from. Where the friction nobody can explain has been building for months.

For the full self-awareness argument, read Self-Awareness: You Think You Know Yourself. Your Team Sees Something Different.

The Bonus: Self-Reflection Comes With It

This is the part most people do not realise until they have been through the process.

If you complete a Belbin assessment with observer feedback, you do not just get a team tool. You get the most honest mirror available for self-reflection - because it shows you the gap between how you see yourself and how the people who work closest with you actually experience you. That gap is more useful than any personality profile, because it is not based on your own assumptions. It is based on observed behaviour.

So: any assessment for self-reflection is a reasonable starting point. But if you want a team tool that also gives you genuine self-reflection, Belbin with observer feedback does both - and does them on the same data set.

For the full comparison between behavioural and personality assessment, read Behavioural Assessment vs. Personality Tests: Which One Actually Helps Your Team?

If you are choosing people - hiring, building a project team, deciding who leads what - a personality profile is the wrong instrument. You need to see behaviour, and how it fits the behaviour already in the room. That starts with one report and a handful of observer assessments.

The $24 billion the market will spend by 2031 is answering a question most organisations have not asked out loud: how do we understand what people actually do with each other, not who they are alone? A Belbin profile with observer feedback shows exactly that. Start with your own. Then add the people who work with you. The gap between what you find and what you assumed is where team development begins.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Do personality tests work for hiring?

Personality tests work only for what they measure - a candidate's self-reported preferences - which is a weak predictor of on-the-job team behaviour, and candidates learn what answers the test rewards. For hiring, the stronger signal is behavioural: how someone contributes in a real team, alongside the people already there, under pressure. A personality profile produced in isolation cannot show fit to the team a candidate is actually joining.

What is the best assessment for hiring and team fit?

The best assessment for hiring and team fit is a behavioural one, not a personality test. Belbin measures how a person contributes in a team and validates it with observer feedback from colleagues, so you see behaviour, not self-image. That lets you ask the question that predicts success: what does this person add that the team is missing, and where will they fit or clash with the behaviour already in the room?

Why is behavioural assessment growing faster than personality testing?

Behavioural assessment is growing faster than personality testing because work has become more team-dependent, and organisations have worked through the limits of pure self-report. In a market projected to reach US$24 billion by 2031, the fastest-growing segment measures behaviour between people, not traits inside one person. Teams need tools that show how people actually perform together - what they produce, where they clash, who covers which gap - which personality profiles were never built to answer.

What is the difference between eligibility and suitability in hiring?

Eligibility is whether someone can do the job - qualifications, experience, test scores. Suitability is whether they fit the team that already exists. A candidate can be fully eligible and still wrong for the room, because the team already has that behaviour covered and is missing something else. Personality tests measure the individual in isolation. Suitability needs a view of the candidate's behaviour against the team they are joining.

Sources

The Insight Partners. Personality Assessment Solution Market Size and Forecast, 2025-2031.

Belbin UK. Behavioural vs Psychometric Tests (belbin.com).

Belbin UK. Research across 78,000+ profiles - self-awareness and observer gap data.

Eurich, T. Insight: The Power of Self-Awareness (2017).

Photo by Mats Soomre · #MomentsBySoomre · moments.soomre.com