Reflective Practice Essay on Group Development Stages

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Reflective Practice Essay
The main reason behind preparing this reflective essay is to determine group development
stages within a multi-professional culture, utilising reflective cycle and appropriate models. As a
business-professional in an organisation, it becomes significant to comprehend the position while
working alone and in a multi-professional group. The aptitude to respect other group member’s values
and knowledge, as a group member is expressed within organisation’s code of practices ( Carpenter,
Bauer, & Erdogan, 2012). Reflection is an integral part of professional practice that act as a self-
examination along with developing skills through which practice can be enhanced. Definition of
effective team is a chosen group member with complimentary capabilities who are assigned to work
together to achieve a planned purpose (Prabhakar, 2008). I explored series of theoretical models
surrounding group development including decisions in group making and Tuckman stages of group
development. Each model gave variation that based on stages of formation, controlling, working and
ending. In my reflective essay, I have decided to explore more on Tuckman’s stages of group
development along with reflecting few of my experiences while evaluating group development stages
in practical life.
Group development efforts have constructive consequence on groups as well as group
members as individuals. Team building is a motivational factor for group members that increases their
self-control while exploiting their personal strength. According to Heel and Ektuna (2017), grouping
and teaming creates an environment that leads to opportunities, learning, networking and acquiring of
new traits for the group members. Khan, et al. (2011), says that in comparison of groups that do not
share common goal, groups that are responsive to external alterations are able to generate an enhanced
platform for learning as well as providing financial advantages with their combined ability to transfer
themselves rapidly in an effective way. Klug & Bagrow (2016) also supports the above saying and
adds that group value and team building is noticeable through their adaption to change, team feeling,

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enhanced problem resolution and improved efficiency in production. Prabhakar (2008) further
elaborates by saying that group development efforts boost creativity, assist in problem solving skills,
entail positive cooperation and interaction, develops self-esteem within members along with
accomplishing objectives in rapid way through shared communications.
To evaluate further about group development stages, we must first need to understand what
constitutes groups and teams. A common definition that can be referenced was presented by Ravi &
Sumanthi (2016): “two or more individuals who are connected to one another by social relationships”
(p. 60). One specific form of group is called team where individuals are supposed to form a common
unit to work together for accomplishing a common goal. The group that I was allocated while we
were working on a course related work comprised of students that belonged to diversified
backgrounds. First day experience while we were trying to form a group, each of us spend time in
collaborating variety of activities along with introducing our personal capabilities. To tackle the task,
we needed guidance and thus we divided our groups into smaller fragments who carried responsibility
according to their capability. The work progressed, however we found difficulties in making effective
communication due to diversified timetables we had to follow in our day to day life. Also, in initial
days we lacked structured model notion until we came to know about group development stages and
team building in week nine of our course study.
Bruce Tuckman published an article related to stages of group development in the year 1965
where he analysed 50 articles that dealt with group development forming three types of groups:
training groups, therapy groups and laboratory groups (Ravi & Sumanthi, 2016). Tuckman further
hypothesized four usual stages of group development that could be identified in the published articles
of that time. These stages are what we now know as Tuckman’s model which is used to determine
how groups are developed from initial formation until the task is completed. Four initial stages
include: forming, storming, norming, and performing. The first stage of the group development model
is forming in which each member of a group is provided with a task. All the group members come
together and formulate what is required to be accomplished thereby introducing themselves
respectively along with establishing initial performance behaviour. The second stage is known as