Task 1: Report on the approaches to developing, managing and leading teams
Introduction
Bringing human resources and payroll back in house creates a team that exists on paper before it exists in practice. Nine people have arrived from four departments, none has worked in shared services, and payroll must run correctly from the first month regardless of how well the team has bonded. This report addresses that situation across the four assessment criteria.
Table of Contents
AC 1.1 Evaluate the use of TWO theoretical models for developing, managing and leading teams
Tuckman’s stages of group development. The model proposes that groups pass through forming, where members are polite and dependent on the leader; storming, where conflict emerges over roles, standards and influence; norming, where working agreements settle; and performing, where the team operates with autonomy. A later fifth stage, adjourning, addresses disbandment.
The model’s principal value is diagnostic and expectational. It tells a manager that the disagreement now surfacing in the payroll sub-team over who checks whose work is a predictable feature of an early-stage team rather than evidence of a hiring error, and that suppressing it would defer rather than resolve the issue. This reframing is genuinely useful for a manager who might otherwise treat conflict as failure. The model also implies different leadership emphasis at different points: direction and structure early, facilitation of disagreement in the middle, and devolution later.
Its limitations are substantial and must be weighed honestly. The sequence is presented as linear when real teams cycle back, and the Calderwood department will return to forming behaviour every time a new recruit joins, which will happen six times over the next two quarters. The stages have no defined duration, so the model cannot tell a manager whether a team is progressing normally or stuck. Its empirical foundation is weaker than its ubiquity suggests, having been derived from a review of small-group literature rather than from controlled study. It also says nothing about composition, capability or task design, which are the variables a manager can actually change.
Belbin’s team roles. The model identifies nine behavioural roles clustered as action-oriented, comprising shaper, implementer and completer finisher; people-oriented, comprising coordinator, teamworker and resource investigator; and thinking-oriented, comprising plant, monitor evaluator and specialist. Its central claim is that team effectiveness depends on behavioural balance rather than on individual ability alone.
Its usefulness in this situation is real. The transferred group is heavily weighted towards implementer and completer finisher behaviour, which is unsurprising given that they were selected from administrative roles, and the absence of plant and resource investigator behaviour is visible in the team’s tendency to process work rather than question it. Naming this as a composition issue rather than an attitude problem is more accurate and more actionable. The vocabulary also gives a new team a neutral way to discuss difference, which is valuable early when personal criticism would be damaging.
The limitations are more serious than the model’s popularity implies. The psychometric properties of the self-perception inventory have been criticised for weak reliability, and scores can shift across administrations, which undermines the idea of a fixed role profile. There is a strong risk of labelling, where a person is treated as a monitor evaluator and thereafter excluded from work requiring initiative. In a nine-person team it is arithmetically impossible to cover nine roles without doubling up, so the balance prescription is difficult to apply at this scale. Behaviour is also situational: an individual may act as a shaper in a domain where they hold expertise and as a teamworker elsewhere.