Four Stages of Team Development

Team effectiveness is enhanced by a team's commitment to reflection and on-going evaluation. In addition to evaluating accomplishments in terms of meeting specific goals, for teams to be high-performing it is essential for them to understand their development as a team.

Teams go through stages of development. The most commonly used framework for a team's stages of development was developed in the mid-1960s by Bruce W. Tuckman, now a psychology professor at Ohio State University. Although many authors have written variations and enhancements to Tuckman's work, his descriptions of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing provide a useful framework for looking at your own team. Each stage of team development has its own recognizable feelings and behaviours; understanding why things are happening in certain ways on your team can be an important part of the self-evaluation process.

The four stages are a helpful framework for recognizing a team's behavioural patterns; they are most useful as a basis for team conversation, rather than boxing the team into a "diagnosis". And just as human development is not always linear, team development is not always a linear process. Having a way to identify and understand causes for changes in the team behaviours can help the team maximize its process and its productivity.

Introduction to the Model

Forming

• Confusion
• Uncertainty
• Assesing situation
• Testing groung rules
• Feeling out others
• Defining goals
• Getting acquainted
• Establishing rules

Storming

• Disagreement over priorities
• Struggle for leadership
• Tension
• Hostility
• Clique formation

Norming

• Consensus
• Leadership accepted
• Trust established
• Standards set
• New stable roles
• Co-operation