Personnel are determining their attendance and it’s affecting the morale of the company. We have an employee that straddles the fence; on one side, she’s an excellent employee that works extremely well with her teammates. On the other side, she shows up late, disrupting the workflow and other group members are assuming that they can do the same. The policies that we created are not adhered to by all management. There shouldn’t be any form of favoritism but it’s being displayed towards this employee and when other employees attempted to violate the policies, they were reprimanded. Why is this happening? This problem was created by one of our managers and corrective measures should be taken with them as well.

There are six of us working our butt off as a group. Yes, there’s conflict, disagreements and animosity sometimes but we produce above and beyond any team within the company. When one of our teammates started showing up late on a continuous basis, we should have addressed the conflict head-on instead of holding it in and allowing it to fester (Lencioni, 2002). Now that most of us have attempted to do the same thing and were written up for it, it has changed the temperament of the team. I’m pissed off because I was late once and was made to believe that I was the one responsible for the team’s demise. All the good work that I’ve done went out the window in comparison to taking my time getting to work. The work in the group is mediocre. No has any faith in anyone’s opinion and we’re barely meeting deadlines without management having to intervene to resolve major conflicts. I just want out and re-assigned to another section.

The Bruce Tuckman model depicted groups in two dimensions, interpersonal relationships and task activity. He created a four-stage model that each group had positively surpass each phase in order to be able to function efficiently as a group (Bonebright, 2010). The model stages are Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning. The first stage deals with building the foundation of the group along with developing relationships within the team, with management and policies set forth in the company. The second stage is similar to a resistance phase. Each person is uncomfortable with each other, there’s no trust and still function somewhat as an individual instead of a team. The third stage is norming; unity is developed and accepted. Respect towards one another is building and understanding each other’s mannerisms are developed. Performing is the fourth stage of the model. The group is structured and functioning as one unit instead of individuals. Each person understands their role within the team. The adjourning phase is the cyclic activity that a group will transition throughout the lifetime of the team.

Our group was once in the Performing stage of the model and due to the inside conflicts that we have, we recycled back to the second stage of the model; Storming. We are having problems within the group that no one wishes to discuss. Trust is no longer amongst the group. No one is willing to address the issues within the group. Everyone is just clocking in and doing whatever they think is needed to get through the day, clocking out and going home.

References

Bonebright, D. A. (2010). 40 years of storming: a historical review of Tuckman's model of small

group development. Human Resource Development International, 13(1), 111-120.

doi:10.1080/13678861003589099

Lencioni, P.M. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. San Francisco,
CA: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved from http://wow.coursesmart.com