Groups go through four sequential stages from formation to disbandment. According to Harris & Sherblom (2018), teams go through forming, storming, norming, and performing stages. Forming involves bringing together a group of people and defining the task at hand. In the storming stage, members seek clarity about their roles and guidance on how to work independently and collectively. This stage is very critical and is usually marred with conflicts and unpleasant disagreements. Norming stage is characterized by the development of shared values and modes of working together. The performing phase is the doing stage and builds from the established norms. According to my interaction with groups, the most important stage that determines the success of a group is storming.
In my experience working in a group tasked with marketing stationery using only pictures and words, the storming stage was the most complex. Unlike the forming phase where there is optimism and excitement about the task at hand, the storming phase was marred with competition, authority and power conflicts. Every member wanted to control the group by forcing their ideas to be adopted. Any rejection and perceived despising were a major cause of differences. Agreeing on a common course of action is usually the elephant in the room (Stepanova et al., 2020). Blatant disagreements resulted in resignation of two members because they felt that their issues and opinions were not considered thus threatening cohesion.
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The main factors that threaten the survival of team formation in this phase are lack of support, inadequate feedback, disruptive and uncooperative behaviors and interpersonal conflicts (Gren et al., 2017). We managed to sail through by allowing all members to air their views and opinions without prejudice. This helped in understanding the complexity of marketing using pictures and words and eventually, we were able to build trust, understand one another and agree on the role of every member. After heated brainstorming sessions, we managed to agree on the right marketing strategies and shared roles but with members agreeing to compromise on their hard stances.
References
Harris, T. E., & Sherblom, J. C. (2018). Small group and team communication . Waveland Press.
Gren, L., Torkar, R., & Feldt, R. (2017). Group development and group maturity when building agile teams: A qualitative and quantitative investigation at eight large companies. Journal of Systems and Software , 124 , 104-119.
Stepanova, E., Rozhkova, A. V., & Grishina, I. I. (2020, June). Team Building as a Method of Teaching Students and Group Cohesion. In 20th European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management Studies: ECRM 2020 (p. 276). Academic Conferences and publishing limited.
