Investigation of a new model of team development through the development and testing of a self-report inventory

• Main Author: Chen, Ming-Huei
• Published: University of Manchester 2001
• Subjects: 658.4
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.632636

Many studies into team development have been conducted over the last thirty years. Tuckman's four-stage model of team development (later a fifth stage 'adjourn' was added) has been long regarded as representative of the current state of theory of team development. However, neither the original Tuckman model, nor its later version drew on new empirical data, but sought to reflect the complexity involved in the developmental stages and to integrate available literature. An alternative model of team development was recently proposed by Rickards and Moger. These authors argued for the existence of two structurally distinct barriers across team development processes: a weak behavioural barrier and a strong performance barrier. The proposed framework relates team performance to a creative leadership style that introduces structures supportive of norm-challenging team behaviours. A set of key team factors, proposed as associated with leaders' efforts, served as mechanisms for improvement of team performance, and for means of reducing the impact of the barriers. The preliminary reports were mainly speculative, and supported by simple qualitative and numerical observations. The research aims to provide a quantitative basis for the investigation of this newly proposed model of team development. A contextual examination of teams in health service organisations is also conducted. Following an opportunistic sampling, three versions of a self-report inventory were developed and administrated to 2179 respondents within training and organisational development studies. The items were developed to capture the essential features contained in the definitions. The preliminary evidence of an empirical study from 1103 participants established that the instrument had acceptable reliability and validity. Six of the seven key team factors were identified. Subsequently, two formats of the instrument were designed to examine the content validity of the team factors and administered to 492 subjects across industries, health service organizations, educational institutions and other sectors. An analysis of the responses revealed a similar factor structure (six factors) to that found in the first study. The items were refined, and a further validated version used with 584 employees from 40 teams of government utilities. The third version successfully identified all seven factors. The reported results have suggested that significant progress has been made towards developing a reliable and valid instrument for assessing team performance. Results also support the postulated relationships between leadership, team factors, and team performance. The qualitative study suggests that 'benign structures' as mechanisms of enhancing individual or team's creativity can be identified and characterised as cues, rules, or other means of achieving positive changes in relationships/actions that team leaders introduced. Qualitative assessments are found to support the quantitative data, indicating links between leadership, team factors and outputs.