Groups progress through forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning.
Tuckman's 1965 model, with adjourning added in 1977. Its evidential basis is weaker than its popularity — the stages are not strictly sequential and groups revisit them — and it survives as vocabulary.
In practice
- A team settled into steady work returns to argument the week a new member joins, and again when the brief changes.
- It survives as vocabulary rather than as a model, and a team told it is "in storming" has been given a name rather than a diagnosis.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is that a new group must settle three things in order, who is here, who decides, and how work is done, before it can produce anything, so the sequence follows from the tasks.
- In its favour
- The vocabulary is genuinely useful, since naming the storming phase tells a group that early conflict is ordinary rather than a sign of failure, and something like the phases is recognisable in new teams.
- Against it
- The stages are not strictly sequential, groups revisit them and often skip them, and the model was built from a review of small-group studies rather than from data collected to test it.
- Standing
- A widely taught model with thin empirical support; groups do not reliably pass through the stages in order.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline