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EDITOR'S NOTE
Thinking today about the phases of group development, a group facilitator is hard pressed to not hear the famous words of Bruce Tuckman's 1965 seminal work Developmental Sequence in Small Groups2 that hypothesized his forming, storming, norming and performing model of group development. Tuckman's 1965 article was reprinted in a Special Issue on Group Development in Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal in 2001(3). What many facilitators may not be aware of is that Bruce Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen conducted a follow-up review thirteen years later, to discover what empirical testing of the model had been conducted by others. The following article, originally published in 1977 in Group & Organization Studies, noted that several subsequent empirical studies suggested a termination stage, which Tuckman and Jensen then integrated into the model of group development as a fifth stage named adjourning. While many have argued that there are limitations of "stage models" such as this, the wide use and popularity of the Tuckman model means this article is suggested reading for every group facilitator. - Stephen Thorpe, Editor
The purpose of this review was to examine published research on small-group development done in the last ten years that would constitute an empirical test of Tuckman's (1965) hypothesis that groups go through the stages of "forming," "storming," "norming, " and "performing." Of the twenty-two studies reviewed, only one set out to directly test this hypothesis, although many of the others could be related to it. Following a review of these studies, a fifth stage, "adjourning, " was added to the hypothesis, and more empirical work was recommended.
Tuckman (1965) reviewed fifty-five articles dealing with stages of small group development in an attempt to isolate those concepts common to the various studies and produce a generalizable model of changes in group life over time. He examined studies of (1) Therapy Groups, (2) human relations training or T-groups, and (3) natural and laboratory-task groups in terms of two realms - task and interpersonal. The way members acted and related to one another was considered groupstructure or the interpersonal realm: the content of the interaction as related to the task was referred to as the task-activity realm. Both realms represented simultaneous aspects of group functioning because...