Bruce Tuckman's Five Stage Development Model

Although coxswains follow the guidance of the coaches, their role is one in which they are asked to motivate and inspire confidence within their rowers, whether it’s their own crew or any other that is a part of the rowing team; their focus is purely on the people – as a coxswain your purpose is ultimately to keep the end goal in their rower’s mind, but you are also expected to look after your rowers. This ranges from ensuring they get to their races on time and they are resting, eating and drinking in between their time on water, to calming nerves and easing disappointment when their performance was below what they had expected from themselves. Coxswains also have to be incredibly adaptive to the environment. The environment is in constant
As a team, we were lucky to have already had a couple years’ experience with each other, in which we had gone through the team building stages of forming, storming, and norming; so at this point of time we were in the “performing” stage. These team development stages mentioned are a part of a 5 stage development model by Bruce Tuckman, and is seen to be something every team/group takes throughout the life span of their purpose. First the form, where they become orientated with each other and their tasks; storming follows, in which the team faces internal conflicts as things settle down and everyone tries to find their position in the team dynamics; the stage that follows in norming, where everything settles down with a sense of focus as the team learns the best way to achieve their goals; next is the performing stage where the team takes everything they’ve learnt in the previous stages and put it to use to achieve their goals. This stage is a stage occasionally repeated alongside the norming stage as teams adjust to different goals. This is something you would see with a rowing team, as every regatta had a new focus, a new level of pressure and a new level of expectation. One of the reasons we worked effectively throughout our time in the “performing” stage is because of our team cohesiveness (the degree to which we were motivated to stay as a group, in term being a defining factor our motivation to perform in our sport). As a team we met six of the seven determinants of cohesiveness, as listed by Robbins, Millett, Cacioppe and Waters-Marsh (2001, pp.