Effective Team working

Effective Team working

Group characteristics:

Formal – constituted for a precise purpose.
Collective identity – based on a combination of common circumstances and environmental factors (all students at Newcastle doing business degrees)
Shared aims and objectives – To achieve a good mark, by successfully completing the project.

Tuckman (1965) outlines a 4 part process to effective team working, these are explained below with reference to this project:

Forming: Creation of team, familiarising personalities, strengths, capabilities, assessment of the group purpose, initial social norms and values and leader appointment.

This process happened in September/October 2006 – Initial meetings.

Storming: First creative burst of the group, producing first document, mutual assessment of expertise and work process. This resulted in initial group disagreements and personality conflicts in relation to power and authority.

Preparation for the Oral Presentation of Research Plans to Clients – Nov 2006.
Initial conflict through limited sharing of responsibility in the Powerpoint presentation creation team leader took full control.

Norming: Establishing group norms and values. These are the underlying codes of conduct, to base assessment of performance activities and contributions.

December 2006, in preparation for progress surgery’s the group learned from initial presentation and ‘normed’ group values over the following series of meetings.

Performing: Getting the work done and assessing performance. Attention given to group effectiveness and cohesion.

Jan/Feb 2007 – After Semester 1 exams, the group reunited, conflicts reached a peak, resulting in a blowout, this was a very important event as after this moment the group could identify the problems and work towards solving them. Productivity significantly increased after this event and remained constant to the final presentation.