Theories of Group Work

I am going to consider group work theories throughout this assignment and identify and analyse how they may impact in my work place.   Effective teams are fundamental to meeting organisational objectives so it's an important area for me to focus my study to improve my working practice especially in my new role as project manager with Foundation Housing (FH).   My role will be to lead a new take over team where the staff has previously worked for the local council.   I will consider what may be understood by the terms teams, and groups. I will then offer a synopsis of Tuckman's theory of group stage development and consider these theories in relation to my current work and how I can apply it in practice.













Katzenbach and Smith (1999) define a team as ‘a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable’.  
Work groups may be defined in many ways, providing a fixed definition of a group work can be highly complex and contestable.   For the purposes of discussing group work within the context of this essay it may simply be explained as the study and application of the processes and outcomes experienced when a small group comes together.

Tuckman identified five stages of group development (1965).   Whilst there is general agreement amongst theorists that group development occurs, they disagree about the exact number, sequence length, and nature of these stages. Brown (1989) writes that Tuckman's theory offers a linear model of group stage development in that one stage follows the next progressively. The first stage,
Forming is the stage when the group first start. Brown (1989) describes this stage as a time when all we have is a collection of individuals, each of whom are concerned with issues to do with joining and inclusion. At the emotional level, behaviour at this stage is often characterised by:

'Approach-avoidance...