Why Team Building?: Getting A Team To Perform

One very good reason to do team building activities for members of an organization is to get the team to perform at a very high level. Teams have to understand that teams do not automatically just click and immediately work at a high performance rate. High performance teams go through several stages before they even perform at a high level.

According to Bruce Wayne Tuckman in his theory of the stages of group or team development in 1965, teams go through the stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing. It is the goal of each team to get to the performing stage.

When a team is formed, the initial stage is dedicated more to socialization, that is getting to know the members of the team and probing to find common ground while avoiding potential areas for conflict. 

A team cannot stay too long in the forming stage. Eventually, some team members would want to move from just simply socializing towards targeting real team goals. As this happens, some team members may feel resistant wanting to preserve the status quo and remain at the stage of merely socializing. This will lead into a conflict, thus the storming stage.

When properly managed, the conflicts of the storming stage will lead team members to agree on norms for the team, expected standards of behavior from all team members. It is normal that some team members may have to leave the team when they don't share the goal of the team in general. Getting the team to agree on norms can basically be the goal or main objective of a team building program as organizations work toward becoming a high performance team.