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Dr. Bruce Tuckman's Model Of Group Work

Decent Essays

Our group was brought together for a purpose of making a presentation. We were strangers to each other but expected commitment in terms of attendance, communication, meetings and quality of work. It can be argued that individuals can be demotivated by group project if they feel their success depends on others who do not share this views and which might lead to discrimination and oppression (CMU, 2015). However this might be resolved by a professional organisation of working process, high motivation and personal responsibility of each group member indicating a successful group development. This project was a valuable experience for developing our teamwork skills and in this essay, I will discuss our group process and theories which can apply …show more content…

Group work can be identified as a method of social work aiming to help groups and individuals to meet their needs in an informed way (Lindsay and Orton, 2009). The primary model of group work which could be applied to our group is Dr. Bruce Tuckman Forming Storming Norming Performing model which he published in 1965 and added Adjourning stage in the 1970th (Lindsay and Orton, 2009). Tuckman suggests that every team goes through a relatively unproductive initial stage before becoming a self-reliant unit and unless the issues of processes and feelings were satisfactorily addressed the team might not reach the most productive final stage (Lindsay and Orton, 2009). Tuckman's model was criticised for emphasising the importance of the exchange in communication and necessity of group members for having an attraction to one another but not aiming as much at group task or goals (Lowman, 2015). It can be argued that contingencies outside the group and its members are just as …show more content…

By projecting the JOHARI window (West, R. and Turner, L., 2009) on our group at the first stage when we met it can be said that the Arena window representing facts about the members, their feelings, desires, and emotions was very small. We had personal awareness towards each other and probably unconsciously we behaved in a discriminatory way towards assessing each other as we did not know professional qualities and how far we can trust each other in completing a reliable presentation. As suggested by some research that group members can project their experience of oppression and feeling of mistrust from their previous life experience (Lindsay and Orton, 2009). This probably was the case with our group at the beginning of our project as we all wanted to achieve good outcomes but had some mistrust in group work as a result of stereotyping the low level of the communal responsibility. With time the Arena windows (West, R. and Turner, L., 2009) of our group members expanded as we explored each other's ability to concentrate on the task, meet a deadline and by giving each other feedback which was appreciated and increased our trust in each other. The group members admitted that the turning point was a self-disclosing process as described by Whitaker's group focal conflict theory. There were only four group members out of five present at this time and through

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