Within the scope of Bianchi type-IX cosmological model we have studied the role of spinor field in the evolution of the Universe. It is found that unlike the diagonal Bianchi models in this case the components of energy-momentum tensor of spinor field along the principal axis are not the same (i.e.,), even in the absence of spinor field nonlinearity. The presence of nontrivial non-diagonal components of energy-momentum tensor of the spinor field imposes severe restrictions both on geometry of space-time and on the spinor field itself. As a result the space-time turns out to be either locally rotationally symmetric or isotropic. In this paper we considered the Bianchi type-IX space-time both for a trivial b, that corresponds to standard Bianchi type-IX and the one with a non-trivial b. It was found that a positive self-coupling constant λ1 gives rise to an oscillatory mode of expansion, while a trivial λ1 leads to rapid expansion at the early stage of evolution. © 2018 Published by NRC Research Press.