Team Working - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-29, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Team working

The ability to work in a team is one that is prized by employers and educationalists alike. It is often requested in job advertisements and displayed on CVs. When employers list their most important skills for promotion, 86% list team working skills. The willingness and ability to work with a group of people towards a single target has become increasingly important in an era when soft skills like communication, creativity, critical thinking and collaboration are essential in work and study. Today's teams are different from those of the past because a team is likely to change membership more often, will be more socially diverse and its members could be located over a wider area - even globally.

In 1965 psychologist Bruce Tuckman recognised that team building goes through different stages, from a collection of individuals to a fully functioning unit. Tuckman did not study groups himself; he reviewed articles about group development. He found that the articles described two features that all the groups had in common: individual interactions and the task activity. Tuckman recognised that groups evolve and he suggested that they do so via four stages that he called forming, storming, norming and performing. Briefly, in the first stage, 'forming', people are getting to know each other and finding their roles in the new hierarchy. In the second stage, 'storming', there are conflicts between members as differences emerge about issues such as what the team is being asked to do and how to do it. In the third phase, 'norming', team members start to work together. They establish processes about who will do what, when and how, and there is a growing sense of cooperation in the team. In the fourth stage, 'performing', the team now has a shared set of norms and has learned how to work well together. The individual members focus less on their position in the team and how to work together and more on their tasks. Tuckman later added a further, final stage, 'adjourning', to his model. In this final stage, the team stops working together, celebrates its success and reflects on its performance and achievements.

The value of Tuckman's model is that it enables us to see team working as a process dependent on interpersonal relationships and the team's interaction with the task. It gives managers and educators a simple, staged model to help them form teams and support the team members as they try to understand where they are in the process. According to the model, all teams are likely to go through these stages in this order, and although it is also possible to go backwards, for example from storming to forming, when a team does this, it must go through the other stages in the same order again. However, the model has been criticised and alternatives have been proposed. Firstly, Tuckman's model was not based on first-hand observations and evidence, and it seems that where the model has been tested, the reality was different from that predicted by the model. A study by the Monterey Naval Postgraduate School showed that only 2% of the teams observed went through all four stages. Furthermore, storming, or conflict, continues throughout the duration of the team's life and conflict happens frequently. Secondly, Tuckman's model excluded external factors such as the nature of the task the group has been given and how this affects progress. Thirdly, the model predicts stability and specialisation: the longer the team stays together, the better it becomes at its task or tasks.

The problem is that when teams become too specialised, this leads to silo working, where teams focus on one task and become territorial about sharing ideas, knowledge and expertise with others in the organisation. In fact, some researchers, like Klaus Schauser at the University of California, have suggested that there is a sixth stage to Tuckman's model: stagnation. Newer companies, especially in the technology sector, require agile - or flexible - teams, and have built their company culture around a process called reteaming, or breaking up teams to build new ones. This enables team members to move between groups so that teams learn from each other. Some online gaming and music streaming companies are noted for their reteaming techniques, believing that this gives them the flexibility to move with their markets and to change and adapt swiftly. One way to re-organise teams is to create situations where a team has to make an effort to recruit new members and there is an ongoing effort to bring in new people. Another way is to let a team grow until it is big enough to divide into two teams; the advantage is that both teams are used to working with each other and so are now two effective working groups. When there is a single temporary problem to solve, volunteers can come together to form a temporary task team. After the work on the problem is completed, the team breaks up and the members re-join their old group. Finally, team members can swap places between teams in order to share learning across the organization.