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Tuckman's stages
Bruce Tuckman's stages of group development run from forming to storming to norming to performing. A group forms, then it storms: conflict rises over who the group is, how power is shared, and even which night of the week to meet. That holds for a trivia club, a church group, a volunteer group, or a new team.
Many groups treat the stages as a straight line, as though one storm gets them through to performing forever. Storms actually happen all the time.
Fights as interviews
Groups also run entrance rituals, like college applications and job interviews, where each side hears who the other is and gets to make a case. After that, nobody holds a midway interview. A later fight over why the group does something a certain way becomes that interview, the moment members articulate why they belong.
All groups fight, including the ones that look as though they have no differences within them.
How did Tuckman come up with these stages?
Bruce Tuckman, then a researcher with the US Navy, reviewed about 50 published studies of therapy, training, and laboratory groups. His 1965 paper in Psychological Bulletin found a common sequence in how groups developed, which he labeled forming, storming, norming, and performing. He and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning, in a 1977 revision. The model has been one of the most cited in the study of teams.
Do groups really move through stages in a line?
Organizational scholar Connie Gersick studied project teams in the 1980s and published her findings in the Academy of Management Journal in 1988. She found that teams often stayed in a fixed pattern for the first half of their allotted time and then changed abruptly at the midpoint. She described this as punctuated equilibrium, borrowing a term from evolutionary biology. The midpoint shift came whatever the team's deadline was.
Why do entrance rituals make people value a group?
Psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills tested this in a 1959 experiment. Women who passed an embarrassing screening to join a discussion group later rated the group, which was dull, as more attractive than women who passed an easy screening. The researchers explained it through effort justification: people who pay a cost for membership convince themselves it was worth it. Their study became a classic in social psychology.
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