Management 624
  High Performance Work Systems

 

Tuckerman's Theory of Group Development

In 1965, Bruce Tuckerman originally only had four stages in his model of group development -- Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. He later added a fifth -- Adjourning and Transforming. This fifth stge is important to understanding groups in organizations as the dynamic world environment requires organizations to adopt more organic forms of organizational structure such as task forces and teams and rely on hierarchical (a.k.a. bureaucratic) structures.

The 5 Stages of Group Development
Forming -- The coming together & preliminary socialization phase
Storming -- Individuals develop & vie for roles within the group
Norming -- Agreement/acceptance, & consensus of roles and decisions
Performing -- Group members focus on achieving commonly agreed upon goals.
Adjourning & Transforming -- After goal accomplishment, the group breaks up & its members join new teams with new goals & the process begins again.

It should be noted that not all groups, even long-term formal groups, successfully master each step in the development process. For example, it could be argued that the United Nations is still in the storming stage, and most certainly is not in the performing stage.

Even high-performing groups will revert to earlier stages under certain circumstances. For example, a change in leadership or addition of new members may cause the team to revert to storming as the new people vie for roles within the group..

On the other hand, others argue that members who successfully go through this process gain ability to  quickly move through the early stages successfully.

Hints for Getting through Each Stage of Group Development
Forming -- The group initiator should be prepared to answer lots of questions about the team's purpose, objectives and external relationships.
Storming -- The group must be focused on its goals and avoid distractions. Conflict resolution and negotiation skills are effective for moving a group through this stage.
Norming -- The leader facilitates the making of large decisions and leaves small decisions to individuals.
Performing -- The leader delegates tasks and projects to the group, and serves as a boundary spanner by representing the group to others.
Adjourning & Transforming -- The leaders shares credit for goal accomplishment with team members and assists them in finding new groups. Some organizations will seed new groups with a core group of high-performers from a prior group.

Web Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forming-storming-norming-performing
                         http://www.businessballs.com/tuckmanformingstormingnormingperforming.htm

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This page was last modified March 11, 2013
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