Tuckman's Five Stages Of Team Development

Definition

Team is a type of group, consisting of work group, consisting of two or more individuals, responsible for achieving a goals or objectives. According to Clutterbuck, “team” is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performing goals, and approach, for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Another definition given by Katzenbach and Smith on team that “An effective team also consists of a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, established performance goals, and approach that hold themselves mutually accountable.” Sinclair also defined a team as a distinctive class of group that is more task oriented than other groups and that

It comes through five major different stages. Before the actual team is form it is only a collection of individual unit, or a part of a group. The member may not even know each other. However a team is developed with the systematic order of creating an effective team.

There are various stages in the team development, Tuckman identified five most important stages in the team formation. He believed that these stages were necessary and can’t be avoided in the team development in order to achieve the common goal and growth of the team. Tuckman’s stages of team development may not be the only means of the development, there are other ways of development too. Like Whheelan and Williams had also stated stages in the team development which may be characteristic into the following stages, structure, status hierarchy, roles, norms, leadership, cohesiveness, and conflict. Brown and Cregan also had identified various stages in the team development like, meaning and purpose; challenges, creativity, and options; unfolding, becoming, and interdependence; and summarizing, evaluating, and culminating. These stages play an important role in the achievement of the team’s goal and meeting its

The teams are made up of employees from different departments but are from the same hierarchical level. They are from the different work areas but they are with the same objective of achieving the common goals. It is an effective way and means of allowing the members of different departments of the same organization or among the different organizations.

This type of teams helps in exchange of ideas and views among the members of the different departments. This improves the working conditions, with the exchange of new ideas. The degree of problem solving also increases and there is coordination in the organization.

Despite of the good functions and usefulness of the cross functional teams there are also other drawbacks of the teams. The teams are very tough to manage as these members are from different departments, they have different views based on their specializations. The toughest part of these team is in the initial stage of its formations. It consumes a lot of time during its formation. The members are from various departments and they are hard to deal with it. Trust can’t be built easily because the members are new to each other and they have different experience. It is the manager who is responsible to facilitate and sees to the development of the