Forming and Storming

Forming stage is the stage of development characterized by orientation and acquaintance. When a team is forming, members are unclear about roles and responsibilities and are exploring the boundaries of acceptable group behavior. There are some characteristics of forming such as Anxiety, polite to each other, Goals are unclear and members are dependent on directive leadership. The team members will form first impressions about both each other and the work that they have to do. In our team, some conflicts did occur concerning speaking another language than English during the meeting. Besides, we were unclear about the goals and what we have to do, lead us to have low effectiveness. The complexity and interdependence of tasks influence the group's effectiveness (Advances in Experimental social Psychology 1975, pp.45-99). Some members spoke Chinese, others Malay. Finally, Timothy and Ching spoke to them and try to solve that issue. Meanwhile, cohesiveness of our group becomes better after setting the communication problem.

After the forming stage, the team proceeds to the storming stage. As the name suggests, this stage is marked by a high degree of internal conflict (Gray & Larson, 2006, p. 344). Usually conflicts and disagreement arises in this stage. Conflict may occur over lack of trust, leadership, goals, and disagreement over procedure and so on. Before we proceed further, we had elected Gerard and Michael as our leaders. A team with leaders can ensure that the discussion process to be more effective. During our first and second meeting, the conflict in our project team was about choosing our product for the team project. Every member is asked to suggest an idea but only a few of them contributed. For example, some of our member argued about the technological products, as it have a lot of types, one of the members suggested phones, computers or TVs. To handle the conflict we used avoiding and compromising style. First, the leader used avoiding style to smooth things out temporary to avoid further argument and to release the tension between the two parties. When the two parties' tension died down, they continued to think about what they really wanted to do for the product and decide what they will give on and what they would not give on, and eventually through all the give and take, a solution is reached. Neither side of the parties wins or loses in this situation. During the third meeting, we had been divided into a few sub groups which are Administration, Production, Human resource, Research and development, design, marketing and Logistics. Each group has their own task to do. Everyone is required to choose a group that they are capable of. As each sub group shares a common goal, the members in the group are more likely to interact and support each other to achieve their goal. This has improved our team cohesiveness. The effectiveness of the team during storming stage is divided into two sections: the productivity