Week 13: Teamworking

Week 13: Teamwork

There have been many occasions when I have been involved on a team which works well. For example my current football team are working well as a team and are consistently performing well and in line for promotion this season. There are many reasons to why we are performing better than previously, the main factor is we are working as a team rather than individuals. This has occurred by having a range of players which all bring different skills to the team. Some players bring the technical and tactical play where as others bring hard work and a will to succeed. We also have been playing together now for a few seasons and now we understand how each other play and we know each others strengths weaknesses. This can be related to Tuckmans theory (1973) where is says teams go through a forming, storming, norming and performing. This can relate as you can say the teams past was the forming to storming stages where as know we are performing as we now know more about each other. Another key factor to the teams success if previously we were a very young side and over time we have know began to grow up as sports players. Eric Berne said that people’s behaviour in a team are that of a child, adult or parent. I believe that the players in our football team have moved from children to adults and the senior players and management play the part of parents to the rest of team, this is another reason I believe why the team is performing better and being more successful.

Tuckman (1973)

Tuckmans theory says team go through stages of forming, storming, norming and performing. These stages include:-

• Forming is where people are testing each other and people are trying to figure peoples personalities out. At this stage people will be polite to each others and will not show their true personality until they are familiar with each other.

• Storming is the stage where people begin to show themselves and begin to challenge each others ideas and roles. This stage is where leaders can begin to be seen and some people can become demotivated and drop out.

• Norming is where the team is formed and starts to be task orientated and becomes organised. In large teams systems start to be put into place and skills are developed. At this point where there are issues to over come it can be done without people opting out or feeling demotivated.

• Performing is where the team is close and is working effectively. The team has reached a mature stage where they can be open and supportive with each other. The strong tam spirit allows for them to be flexible and sharing the work and being resourceful.

Our Team work

For our first assignment I believe our team reached the norming stage, I believe we potentially showed signs of moving into performing but we never reached it. The reason why I believe we reached norming is because we quickly got through forming as we already knew each other and had a idea of what our personalities were like. All 3 of use wanted to work together and we were motivated to work but in order to reach the norming stage we set up a private group on a social networking site where we regularly updated each other with how our work was coming on and we also spoke through issue and organised meetings, reading through each others work. The communication between the team revolved around the task at hand. This is why I believe we were defiantly in the norming stage.  By setting up a group out side of the university we were being resourceful which is in performing but I don’t believe we showed enough of the other qualities needed to fall into the performing stage. Our mark reflects this as we got a high mark because we reached the norming stage but we didn’t reach our full potential and there was room for improvement, and the only way to reach our potential would be to move onto the performing stage.