Tuckman's Stages of Team Development

In 1965, Bruce Tuckman reviewed about fifty published articles on small-group development. Most of them described therapy groups, training groups and laboratory groups rather than work teams.

He noticed a recurring sequence and summarized it in four stages with memorable names: forming, storming, norming and performing. He described each stage in two realms: the group's interpersonal structure, and its activity on the task.

In 1977, Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen reviewed 22 later studies (only one a direct test of the model) and added a fifth stage, adjourning, for the end of a group's life.

Tuckman's model is therefore a synthesis of earlier research, offered as a hypothesis about group development rather than as a tested law.

Adjourning is sometimes informally called "mourning", but the name in the model is adjourning.

The stages of Tuckman's model therefore describe both how a team behaves and what it needs from whoever leads it.

Team development is not a one-way journey. When a team's membership, leader, goals or ways of working change, a team that was performing can return to forming or storming.

At Harbourside Council, a well-established benefits team is merged with a smaller team from another department and given a new manager. Within weeks, meetings become tense: the two groups disagree about which procedures to keep and who decides. The team has gone back to storming. The new manager does not suppress the conflict; she sets time aside to agree roles and a shared process, and the team settles into norming.

Practical implications for a change manager:

• Expect regression when a change restructures teams, and plan support for it.
• Do not read storming as failure. It is a normal step toward agreed ways of working.
• Do not schedule the stages. The model gives no fixed duration for any stage.
• Plan the adjourning of project teams, including the handover of knowledge.

Tuckman's model therefore helps a change manager anticipate the team dynamics that a change will trigger.

Tuckman described group behavior, not leadership style, but practitioners often pair the stages with a shift in the leader's role:

1. Forming: direct. Set purpose, structure and initial roles.
2. Storming: coach. Bring conflict into the open, keep it on the work, help the team agree how it will operate.
3. Norming: support. Step back from decisions and reinforce the norms the team has agreed.
4. Performing: delegate. Give the team autonomy and remove obstacles.
5. Adjourning: recognize. Celebrate results, capture lessons and help members move on.

Psychological safety matters most in storming: people need to disagree without fearing for their standing.

Used this way, Tuckman's model gives a leader a simple question: what does this team need now?

The model's strengths are its simplicity and its memorable names, which give teams a shared vocabulary for what they are experiencing.

Its limits:

• Evidence base. The 1965 review drew mainly on therapy and laboratory groups, and Tuckman himself called for further testing. The model spread through practice before research took it up (Bonebright, 2010), and direct tests of the sequence remain few.
• Linearity. Real teams loop back, skip or overlap stages. Gersick (1988) found that teams with deadlines moved through long inertia and sudden shifts, timed by deadlines, rather than a gradual sequence.
• No timings. The model does not say how long a stage lasts or how to tell exactly when a team has moved on.
• Context. Virtual, cross-functional and short-lived teams may not follow the pattern.

Tuckman's model is therefore best used as a lens for conversation, not as a diagnostic instrument.