BUSN20017 Reflective Essay: Group Development and Communication

This reflective essay delves into the intricacies of group development within a multi-professional environment, employing reflective cycles and theoretical models. The essay primarily focuses on Tuckman's stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning, analyzing the dynamics of team building and the significance of organizational structure and communication. The student reflects on personal experiences within a diverse group, highlighting challenges in communication and the importance of shared goals. The essay emphasizes the practical application of these concepts, including the impact of organizational communication on job performance, and concludes with a reflection on the acquired knowledge and its relevance to future career aspirations in leadership roles. The essay references various academic sources to support its arguments and offers a comprehensive overview of group dynamics and effective business communication.

[Date]
Reflective Practice Essay
STUDENT NAME
INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION(S)

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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

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storming and Tuckman labels this stage as “intragroup conflict” stage (Hingst, 2006). According to
Tuckman, once a group is formed, they may develop tendency to become hostile towards each other’s
due to group and personality are forced among each other’s. Third stage is norming that is also
characterized by group development cohesion. In this stage, group members start accepting the
situation in which they are along with giving an initiation to develop shared attitudes and beliefs (Hurt
& Trombley, 2007).
According to Dexel (2009), these shared attitude and belief becomes group norms and enable
entry to the fourth stage i.e. performing. In the performing stage, group members work towards
accomplishment of work as they have resolved group conflicts and infighting while defining their
individual role. This stage is also called as role relatedness by Tuckman in which individual group
member perceive themselves related to the group thereby accomplishing group work combinedly.
Fourth stage is also called as emergence of solutions by Tuckman as this stage becomes problem-
solving stage and hence puts forth necessary exertion to complete the work till the solution is found.
Later in 1977, with assistance of Mary Ann Jensen, the group development stages of Tuckman were
revisited and updated. As a result, a new stage was added to the above four stages called as adjourning
stage. This became the final stage when it is determined that the group task is completed or group
goals seems accomplished. The groups can then be terminated with their responsibilities (Ravi &
Sumanthi, 2016).
Since development of Tuckman’s model, many theories have stemmed like Tubbs model that
consists of three detail elements like applicable contextual features, internal influences and
significances. Tubb’s model is also easier to recognize group development process, but as compared
to Tuckman’s model, it doesn’t seem much useful as Tubb’s model is based majorly on extra factors
rather than individual personalities (Ritson, 2011). Although Tuckman’s model does not seem
sophisticated and without mentioning extra factors affecting group members, it shows simplicity in its
installation and labelling of different stages. Nevertheless, Tuckman’s model comes with few
criticisms also where Hurt & Trombley (2007) proposed that in Tuckman’s group development stage,
the group progress is linear through all the five stages. The authors suggest that Tuckman models can

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prove deficient in its capability while describing those group members who do not follow linear
progression. For example, what will happen if a group fails in norming stage? According to
Tuckman’s model, a group cannot move forth in next stage without completing the former stages and
hence the Tuckman’s model may fail during certain times.
According to me, the models often fail to distinguish the concepts between team and group
work which I think is necessary to be taken care of. One can easily recognise these concepts at
different developmental stages however, writing about developing team performance can further
cultivate group development stages. By describing different stages according to the growing team,
like working group, high-performance team and potential team, this process can bring difference in
both dynamic as well as linear development models as mentioned above. Teams work differently from
groups that are based on specific job performance where collective number of individuals perform to
complete specific job roles (Heel & Ektuna, 2017). Team members commit shared goal and takes
responsibility to fulfil the task whereas groups pose pseudo team that calls itself a team but do jot take
commitment risks. Therefore, to develop a group into a team, working from starting stage becomes
important where sharing of common objective as well as results must be necessitated. Information is
shared in most of the cases via formal and informal communication methods that emphasises on task
performance of each member while taking their own responsibility. A potential group will always
strive to enhance their performance as they share common approach, but to develop equal distribution
of responsibilities, complimentary commitment and critical guidance via group leader provides group
with developed processes (Prabhakar, 2008).
Nevertheless, many others argue about usefulness provided by Tuckman’s group development
stages as when it was created until now many people have utilised this model to predict
developmental stages of groups tasks. Other than group development stages, organisational structure
and communication seemed very critical for me as I can utilise them in my future career where I
aspire to become a team leader or a manager in a multinational company. To understand the reason
behind group development, understanding organisational objective and structure is very important.
According to Kanten, et al. (2015), organisational structure is a system that defines hierarchy in any

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organisation. It is used to define job role and its function along with providing guidelines for
individual responsibility. Organisational structure studied by me during the course will assist me to
determine how organisation I work for operates and hence can assist their leaders in developing and
obtaining organisational goals for gaining competitive advantage. Similarly, organisational
communication will benefit me to build a strong relationship among group members and in between
different levels in organisation to enhance job performance and job satisfaction. According to
Yildirim (2014), organisational communication can be defined as a form of channel that enables
communication between members of organisation like corporates and multinational companies.
Organisational communication is further divided into formal and informal communications that will
be utilised by me depending upon the situation and by making use of various communicational
medias.
The above essay presented my learning during the ten weeks course where I have critically
explored Tuckman’s development stages. I found these stages very useful in giving clarity for group
structure that allowed me to work effectively on common objective. The group development
experience, as mentioned above in the essay proved most significant for me during the forming stage
as we had issues earlier in this stage. Although in this stage each group member desires to be
accepted by others, critical issues arise due to which this stage is often neglected by us. However, now
I have understood its importance and found that this stage is most critical in group development
stages. Now I am certain that without successful completion of forming stage, we cannot progress
further in storming stage where we usually come up with diversified ideas and in norming stage, we
make mutual decisions and become motivated to work combinedly. After completing my course
weeks, I now find myself as a grown individual and understood that teams remain depended upon
each other while working for a common goal.

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References
Carpenter, M., Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2012). Management Principles. Creative Commons.
Dexel, L. (2009). Qualitative Examination of the Group Development Process Within an Adventure
Programming Context . Retrieved from
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/rws_etd/document/get/ohiou1244478793/inline
Heel, A. V., & Ektuna, T. (2017). Developing Teams in Startups. Retrieved from
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?
func=downloadFile&recordOId=8913995&fileOId=8914007
Hingst, R. (2006). Tuckman’s theory of group development in a call centre context: does it still work?
. 5th Global Conference on Business & Economics. Cambridge.
Hurt, A. C., & Trombley, S. M. (2007). The Punctuated-Tuckman: Towards a New Group
Development Model. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED504567.pdf
Kanten, P., Kanten, S., & Gurlek, M. (2015). The Effects of Organizational Structures and Learning
Organization on Job Embeddedness and Individual Adaptive Performance. Procedia
Economics and Finance, 23, 1358-1366.
Khan, R. A., Khan, F. A., & Khan, M. A. (2011). Impact of Training and Development on
Organizational Performance. Global Journal of Management and Business Research, 11(07),
63-68.
Klug, M., & Bagrow, J. P. (2016). Understanding the group dynamics and success of teams. Royal
Society Open Science, 03(04).

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Prabhakar, G. P. (2008). Teams and Projects: A Literature Review . International Journal of Business
and Management, 03(10), 3-7.
Ravi, B. S., & Sumanthi, G. (2016). Study on Theory of Group Development; Groups and Teams.
IOSR Journal of Business and Management, 18(02), 58-61.
Ritson, N. (2011). Strategic Management. Ventus Publishing.
Yildirim, O. (2014). The Impact of Organizational Communication on Organizational Citizenship
Behavior: Research Findings. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 150, 1095-1100.