The focus of this week’s Norwegian day trip was team building activities. We were split into teams upon our arrival, the teams were mixed with both Norwegian and international students. My team consisted of Connor, Ida, Ingrid and Hanne.
We were set 6 tasks including:
Building a stretcher and carrying the largest team member from A-B.
Building a fire and hard boiling an egg.
A memory game, where you had 2 minutes to memorise 40 objects.
A scavenger hunt where you had to find natural objects for each letter of the alphabet.
A race including carrying large stones and building a tower out of them before carrying the stones back to the beginning and repeating until the time was up.
And finally Learning a Norwegian children’s song and performing it in front of the group.
Over the course of the day we were awarded points for how well we did in each task and the winning group would receive a prize. As we were a new group, gaining points and the possibility of a prize at the end of the day gave us a common goal that we didn’t have previously and therefore provided us with a motivation to stay together and work together as a group. At the end of the day we came in 2nd to last place and missed out on the prize.
As we were a new group of people it could be said we were in the ‘forming’ stage of Tuckman’s (1965) group development model. This stage involves the group getting to know one another and experimenting with their roles in the group. As we were in this stage we did not have clear roles for ourselves within the group, meaning that there was no clear leader. This could be seen as the reason for our lack of success especially in the first 2 tasks where we came 2nd to last in the stretcher challenge and last place in the egg challenge.
When moving on through the other challenges we started to experience more success doing relatively well in the remaining 4 challenges. It is said that groups that experience success have the chance to develop strong group cohesion. This is because we are starting to learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses and therefore also starting to realise our roles within the group.
If we had an earlier increase in our cohesion we may have been able to do better in the tasks and gain more points. However this could have only occurred if we had been together as a group for a longer period of time and had the chance to go through the stages of group development until we reach the ‘performing’ stages where cohesion is often high.
Overall this trip illustrated how groups that lack cohesion and are in the early stages of group formation are less likely to perform well and succeed. It also provided us with a chance to increase our repertoire of team building games.
References:
Tuckman, B. (1965) ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’, Psychological Bulletin. 63(6), pp. 384-399. Available from: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=Tuckman%2C+B.W.+1965.+Developmental+sequence+in+small+groups&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp [Accessed: 19/11/16].