Tuckman’s model identifies the five stages through which groups progress: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Each of the five stages of team development represents a step on the team-building ladder.

In 1965, a psychologist named Bruce Tuckman said that teams go through 5 stages of development: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. The stages start from the time that a group first meets until the project ends. Each is aptly named and plays a vital part in building a high-functioning team.

A group is formed through collective efforts of forming, norming, storming and performing. However, adjourning a group completes the group formation. It shows that the group has been successful in completing its pre-determined objective.

Team formation begins with an understanding about how individual people work alone and together. Forming ground rules supports a team in understanding each other’s working styles and values. Once these differences in values and thinking are discussed and integrated into the team’s culture collaboration can begin.

It builds trust, mitigates conflict, encourages communication, and increases collaboration. Effective team building means more engaged employees, which is good for company culture and boosting the bottom line. It can also be adventurous and enjoyable if you do it with a little pizzazz.

Tuckman (1965) identified four stages of team development including Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.

Group norms are the informal rules that groups adopt to regulate and regularize group members’ behavior. Although these norms are infrequently written down or openly discussed, they often have a powerful, and consistent, influence on group members’ behavior (Hackman, 1976).

Initially, during the forming and storming stages, norms focus on expectations for attendance and commitment. Later, during the norming and performing stages, norms focus on relationships and levels of performance. Teams with strong performance norms and high cohesiveness are high performing.

Some teams will never develop past this stage, that said, conflict and disagreements within the team can also make a team stronger, more versatile, and able to work more effectively as a unit. The storming stage is necessary to the growth of the team.

Norming refers to the process of constructing norms or the typical performance of a group of individuals on a psychological or achievement assessment. Tests that compare an individual’s score against the scores of groups are termed norm-referenced assessments.

Tuckman’s theory focuses on the way in which a team tackles a task from the initial formation of the team through to the completion of the project. Tuckman’s theory is particularly relevant to team building challenges as the phases pertain to the completion of any task undertaken by a team.

The Tuckman Team Model. “Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development,” proposed by psychologist Bruce Tuckman in 1965, is one of the most famous theories of team development. It describes four stages that teams may progress through: forming, storming, norming, and performing (a 5th stage was added later: adjourning).

Tuckman studied teams from formation to completion of a task and identified crucial stages in a team’s life cycle. Belbin’s observations of teams uncovered nine Team Roles, which describe ways of contributing and interrelating in a team.

Belbin suggests that, by understanding your role within a particular team, you can develop your strengths and manage your weaknesses as a team member, and so improve how you contribute to the team. Team leaders and team development practitioners often use the Belbin model to help create more balanced teams.

Belbin Team Roles helps teams to adapt to changing goals by highlighting collective strengths and minimising weaknesses. This enables the team to be more cohesive (yet adaptable) in a changing environment. Responses to change can vary with individuals.

Successful teams tend to be successful because they’re more than a bunch of individuals who happen to be working together; their relationships, their direction and their ways of working and collaborating together mean that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.