Project Team Development

Bruce tuckman an educational psychologist identified a five stage development process that most teams follow to become high performing.

Project team development. This process of learning to work together effectively is known as team development. Research has shown that teams go through definitive stages during development. The process of developing project team is associated with teamwork management considering all team building factors such as cultural diversity team climate and global environment. Stages of team development.

The adjourning stage is when the team is completing the current project. First some background on team development. Project teams do not spontaneously emerge as productive high performance groupsrather they are the output of the deliberate actions of the leaders and team members to produce an environment of trust and collaboration. Lets have a graphical representation of this process with time and team effectiveness point of view on any project.

You can see clearly that effectiveness is almost the same for the forming adjourning stage but is way down in storming. They will be joining other teams and moving on to other work in the near future. Regardless of whether a team is working on a small simple initiative or a large complex global initiative the team will progress through the five stages. The first four stages of the team development model was proposed and developed by bruce tuckman in 1965.

Team members commit to your project when they believe their participation can help them achieve worthwhile professional and personal goals. His theory called tuckmans stages was based on research he conducted on team dynamics. New team members can understand the projects background and purpose find out about their roles and assignments raise concerns about time frames and budgets and identify issues that may affect the projects success. In 1977 tuckman teamed up with mary ann jensen and added the 5 th stage adjourning.

It is essential to consider the fact that teams develop and get mature over a period of time. Forming storming norming performing and adjourning. And from this practice project managers quickly learned how teambuilding promotes effective team performance which leads to successful project outcomes. As a project manager your primary task to handle this stage effectively than other stages.

Team progress through the stages is shown in the following diagram. Bruce tuckmans 5 stages of team development. The four stages of team development are. One of the most important developments that occurred in the management field during the 1970s was the increasingly common use of project teams to implement short term efforts efforts that realized organizational objectives.

Teamwork management and team building should be organized and implemented in the context of clearly and timely stated communication between team members throughout the whole project life cycle. Help team members develop and buy into a shared sense of the project goals by doing the following. Every team goes through the five stages of team development. Lets see these stages one by one.

But teams are an effective tool of employee motivation. This article examines how project managers can resolve the issues that commonly interfere with a project teams. He called the stages. He believed as is a common belief today that these stages are inevitable in order for a team to grow to the point where they are functioning effectively together and delivering high quality results.

The first four stages of team growth were first developed by bruce wayne tuckman and published in 1965. For a high performing team the end of a project brings on feelings of sadness as the team members have effectively become one and now are going their separate ways.