The Stages of Group Development: A Retrospective Study of Dynamic Team Processes

Abstract The number of organizations using teamwork is increasing. The team phenomenon has heightened our need to better understand what makes these groups more or less effective. Unfortunately, methods of assessing dynamic team processes such as group development have been limited. The purpose of this study was to create a simpler quantitative method of measuring temporal changes in group processes. A retrospective questionnaire was developed to measure the constructs of Tuckman's stage development model. Both the reliability and content validity analyses provided evidence that the retrospective method can be used to evaluate group development stages. Resume Le nombre d'organisations ayant recours au travail d'equipe est a la hausse. Le phenomene de l'«equipe » accroit la necessite de mieux comprendre ce qui rend ces groupes plus ou mains performants. Malheureusement, les methodes d'evaluation du type d'interactions au sein du groupe et de la dynamique qui en resulte, restent limitees. Le but de cette etude est de creer une methode quantitative plus simple pour mesurer les changements temporels dans la dynamique de groupe. Un questionnaire retrospectif a ete elabore pour mesurer les facteurs du modele a phases de Tuckman. Les analyses relatives a la fiabilite et celles relatives a la validite, ont montre que la methode retrospective peut servir a evaluer les phases du developpement du groupe.

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