Question
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work”
Recall what you learned this week about the five stages of group development and team performance. With that in mind, respond to the following:
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Describe one workplace scenario in which understanding of these five stages could have helped you work more effectively with a team. Provide a rationale for your response.
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Reflect on your teamwork experience and share the good, bad, and tolerable characteristics of being a team member.
Sample paper
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Groups or teams form in order to accomplish certain tasks. As team members come together, a group structure begins to emerge and continues to evolve as the group goes through various stages. Tuckman identified four major stages in which groups move through as they evolve. A fifth stage is also included in the group development process. Groups may successfully move through the five stages. However, some groups may skip some stages leading to certain problems. This paper is a description of a workplace scenario in which the understanding of the five stages could have helped improve the team members’ cooperation and coordination.
Scenario for applying five stages of group development and performance
A workplace scenario in which we could have applied the knowledge of the five stages of group development and performance involved group work to identify customer satisfaction levels with the company’s services and products. The CEO assigned the role of obtaining customer feedback to the Marketing Department of the organization. Being part of the department, the task involved meeting the highly valued customers within the locality and obtaining feedback about the products and services. The group would table the findings in the following week. We held a few meetings to deliberate on how we would go about obtaining feedback from the customers. We appointed a team leader to coordinate the members and ensure everything went according to plan. However, the team leader did not assign specific tasks to members. As such, each member would have to collect all information and visit any customer that he/she wished. While collating the results, the team leader expressed disappointment that some team members had failed to do the work, while others obtained sketchy information from the customers.
Understanding of the five stages could have helped in working more effectively as a team. The team went through the forming and storming stages successfully. Forming stage involves bringing the team together and defining the reasons for forming the group (Dwyer, 2012). Storming stage is about defining the leadership structure of the group. This was successful since there was an appointment of the team leader. Norming stage involves defining the work to be done, how it should be done, and developing common behavior (Dwyer, 2012). The norming stage was not successful since the team did not establish the team expectations. The team leader did not set rules that would guide member behavior.
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Performing stage
Performing stage involves getting things done (Dwyer, 2012). The team leader also manages any emerging conflicts among team members. The team leader aims at developing the team members at this stage. Understanding of this phase could have enabled the group leader to ensure he communicates with team members during fieldwork and ensure they collect the right information. Adjourning involves finalizing on the goals of the group (Dwyer, 2012). My case is similar to The Forgotten Group Member case study, where the group did not successfully go through the norming stage. This led to some members (Mike in particular) not being committed to achieving the objectives of the group.
There are good, bad, and tolerable characteristics of being a team member. One of the good characteristics of working with team members is intellectual stimulation that results from sharing ideas. Another good characteristic is shared workload since each member can perform a certain task of the whole. Another good characteristic is complementing on the strengths of each other. One of the bad characteristics is the unequal participation of members especially where the group did not successfully go through the five stages. Some members may be less committed than others may. Another bad characteristic is conflicts among members. For instance, members are likely to engage in blame game when the group fails to achieve its objective. The tolerable aspect is that being in a team brings all members together to achieve a common task.
Reference
Dwyer, J. (2012). Communication for business and professions: strategies and skills. Pearson Higher Education AU.
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