Business Psychology

In the corporate world today, team working is vital to any organisation striving not only for global success but to maximize its full potential of the company as well as its employees. Throughout years of measuring and analysing team work, several benefits, and in fact a considerable number of limitations have arisen often making it increasingly difficult for managers to create and maintain high performance teams. Through academic models such as Tuckman and The Belbin approach, organisations have been able to realize their strengths, identify weaknesses, and manage successful teams where each member strives to “obtain and utilize complementary skills for the purpose of problem solving and decision making” (McKenna, Eugene. 2010, pg. 363).
Establishing what a team is and the difference between a team and a group is important before identifying the advantages and disadvantages of one. A team is a group of individuals who work together for a common purpose with common goals and objectives. Individuals who are incompatible with each other will fail to achieve overall success resulting in not only an individual failure, but also the failure of their entire team. “ (Belbin, R. Merideth. 2010)
Tuckman's model and Belbin's theory are the 2 significant models commonly referred to when analysing the benefits and limitations of team working. When a team is developing it normally passes through for main stages in a set sequence. Tuckman’s model includes “dominant task-related and social considerations” (McKenna, Eugene. 2012). The stages are: Forming, storming, norming and performing. Forming is when the focus is on the nature of the job need to be one, and how best the team can do it with their available resources. They decide on a leader and try to work out how to act towards other members. The second stage is storming. There can be an emotional resistance to the demands of the job. This is a result of the individual experiencing a mismatch between the demands of the job