Bruce Tuckman's Five Stages Of An Effective Team

Effective team work is crucial in an interdisciplinary team. However, it can be difficult for health care professionals from diverse fields to form a cohesive team. To alleviate these difficulties, researchers have studied the development of group members during the formation of a team. Bruce Tuckman proposed five common stages that group members often go through when forming a team. The five stages include: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. I had the opportunity to experience majority of these stages in my IRHE 2000 course assigned group projects.
The first stage of team formation that Bruce Tuckman discovered is the forming stage. During the forming stage, group members experience mixed emotions of anxiety and excitement concerning the task ahead. The team quickly begins to form as group members are often positive and polite while introducing each other and figuring out what the team will do. During the forming stage, a team leader begins to take charge and coordinate tasks to each members. I believe our group went through the forming stage as Bruce Tuckman depicted. One group member took initiated to split the assignment up by our alphabetical name order.

Various common scenarios occur during this stage causing the most team failures. Conflict between team members’ natural working styles is one common scenario example. Because members’ working style become evident during this style, tension can arise between members’ with dissimilar working style. During the first assignment, my group had difficulty with one group member’s working style. That group member worked best late at night. Therefore as we moved in the third stage, we discovered that the group member’s strengths were combining, editing, and submitting the final project rather than a group member who completes his or her assignment in the