Learning objectives
After completing this unit, you will be able to:
- Explain team development stages and the shifting leadership role across them
- Define psychological safety and describe its impact on team learning and performance
- Analyse the diversity paradox and the role of inclusion in activating diverse teams
- Propose leadership practices for building trust and effectiveness in virtual and distributed teams
Latticework check-in
Opening reflection
Teams as complex adaptive systems — emergence, feedback loops, and network effects all apply at the team level.
A team is more than the sum of its members. Team dynamics emerge from interactions, and small changes in trust, communication, or norms can create reinforcing loops — for better or worse.
What makes a team effective?
Team effectiveness
According to Hill (2003), an effective team does not only involve team performance, but is characterized by three criteria:
- The team performs: the output meets the standards of those who have to use it
- The team members are satisfied and learn (i.e., the team experience contributes to each member’s personal well-being and development)
- The team adapts and learns (i.e., the team experience enhances the capability of members to work and learn together in the future)
These criteria remind us that short-term results alone do not define a successful team — sustainability and growth matter equally.
Team paradoxes
Just as organizations face paradoxes (Unit 3), so do teams. Committed leaders need to be aware of at least four contradictory forces in team work and deal with these paradoxes (Hill, 2003):
- Embrace individual differences ⭤ Embrace collective identity and goals
- Foster support ⭤ Foster confrontation
- Focus on performance ⭤ Focus on learning and development
- Rely on managerial authority ⭤ Rely on team members’ discretion and autonomy
Navigating these paradoxes requires behavioral complexity — the ability to move across the CVF quadrants depending on what the team needs at a given moment.
Remember the competing values framework from Unit 3: effective team leadership requires moving fluidly between collaborate (building trust and belonging), create (encouraging experimentation), compete (driving results), and control (establishing clear processes). No single quadrant suffices for the complex demands of team leadership.
Team development models
Tuckman’s stage model
Tuckman (1965) proposed that teams progress through predictable stages:
Forming —Storming —Norming —Performing— Adjourning
Tuckman’s model is the most widely known team development framework:
- Forming
- Team members come together, get acquainted, and explore boundaries. Characterized by politeness, uncertainty, and dependence on the leader for direction. Members are testing the waters — “Will I be accepted? What are the rules?”
- Storming
- Conflict emerges as members assert individual perspectives, challenge authority, and compete for influence. This is the most uncomfortable but also the most critical stage — teams that avoid or suppress storming often fail to develop the trust and candor needed for high performance.
- Norming
- The team develops shared norms, roles, and ways of working. Cohesion increases, and members begin to value the group’s goals over individual agendas. A sense of “we” emerges.
- Performing
- The team functions at a high level — members are interdependent, flexible, and focused on shared goals. Conflict is managed constructively, and the team can handle complex tasks with minimal supervision.
- Adjourning (added by Tuckman & Jensen, 1977)
- The team disbands after completing its task. This stage involves reflection, celebration, and sometimes grief over the end of meaningful working relationships.
While intuitively appealing, the model has limitations: it implies a linear progression that many teams do not follow. Teams can regress to earlier stages when facing new challenges, membership changes, or external shocks.
Wheelan’s Integrated Model of Group Development
The IMGD (Wheelan, 2005) provides an empirically grounded refinement of Tuckman’s stages:
| Stage | Focus | Key behaviors |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 1: Dependency & inclusion | “Will I belong?” | Members look to the leader for direction; communication is tentative; conflict is avoided |
| Stage 2: Counterdependency & fight | “Who has influence?” | Members challenge the leader and each other; subgroups form; conflict over values and procedures |
| Stage 3: Trust & structure | “How do we work together?” | Mature negotiation of roles, norms, and goals; increased trust and open communication |
| Stage 4: Work & productivity | “Let’s get it done.” | High task focus; effective collaboration; flexible role allocation; constructive conflict |
The model adds several important nuances to Tuckman (1965):
- Teams don’t progress linearly — they can regress to earlier stages when facing membership changes, new tasks, or external pressures. A Stage 4 team that loses a key member may temporarily return to Stage 2 dynamics.
- Most teams never reach Stage 4 — Wheelan (2005)’s research suggests that many organizational teams remain stuck in Stages 1 or 2, never developing the trust and structure needed for true high performance.
- Time matters — teams need sufficient time together to develop. Short-lived project teams or teams with frequent membership changes face inherent developmental challenges.
- The leader’s role shifts across stages — in Stage 1, members need more direction and structure. In Stage 2, the leader must manage conflict without suppressing it. In Stage 3, the leader can increasingly delegate. In Stage 4, the leader serves primarily as a boundary manager and resource provider.
This shifting leadership role connects directly to situational leadership (Unit 3): directive → coaching → supporting → delegating maps onto the stages of team development.
The leader’s role across stages
The leader’s approach must adapt as the team develops:
| Team stage | Leadership approach | Key actions |
|---|---|---|
| Dependency & inclusion | Directive | Provide clear structure, establish safety, model expected behavior |
| Counterdependency & fight | Coaching | Normalize conflict, facilitate dialogue, protect minority voices |
| Trust & structure | Supporting | Encourage self-management, support emerging norms, delegate decisions |
| Work & productivity | Delegating | Manage boundaries, secure resources, remove obstacles |
Notice how this maps onto the situational leadership model from Unit 3 (Hersey & Blanchard, 1977): as the team matures, the leader gradually shifts from high-task/high-relationship behavior to low-task/low-relationship behavior. The leader does not become less important — but the nature of the leadership contribution changes from providing answers to creating conditions.
This is also an example of adaptive leadership in action: in early team stages, many challenges are technical (establishing roles, processes, and norms). As the team matures, challenges become more adaptive (navigating interpersonal tensions, developing shared mental models, balancing competing priorities).
Psychological safety
Definition
Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.
Edmondson (1999) showed that psychological safety enables learning behavior in teams — asking questions, admitting mistakes, seeking feedback, experimenting — which in turn drives team performance.
The research by Edmondson (1999) began with a puzzling finding: the best-performing hospital nursing teams reported more errors, not fewer. It turned out that these teams had higher psychological safety, which meant members felt safe to report and discuss errors — leading to more learning and ultimately fewer repeated mistakes. Teams with low psychological safety underreported errors, creating an illusion of competence while actually performing worse.
The key insight: psychological safety is not about being nice or avoiding conflict. It is about creating an environment where people feel safe to be candid — to disagree, to point out problems, to ask “stupid” questions, and to admit “I don’t know.” This candor is the foundation of team learning.
The research evidence
The model of Edmondson (1999): Psychological safety → Learning behavior → Team performance
Key findings from the research:
- Teams with higher psychological safety engage in more learning behaviors (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting)
- Learning behavior mediates the relationship between psychological safety and team performance
- Psychological safety is a group-level phenomenon — it is a shared perception, not an individual trait
- Leader behavior is the strongest predictor of team psychological safety
Project Aristotle
Google’s Project Aristotle — a large-scale internal study of team effectiveness — confirmed and extended these findings:
Psychological safety was the #1 predictor of team effectiveness at Google, more important than team composition, structure, or individual talent.
The five key dynamics of effective teams (in order of importance):
- Psychological safety — Can we take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
- Dependability — Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
- Structure & clarity — Are goals, roles, and plans clear?
- Meaning — Is the work personally important to us?
- Impact — Do we believe our work matters?
Project Aristotle studied 180+ teams at Google over two years. The researchers initially expected to find that team composition (e.g., having the right mix of skills or personalities) would be the key factor. Instead, they found that how teams worked together mattered far more than who was on the team.
This finding reinforces a key message from our course: leadership is not just about selecting the right people (traits, Unit 2) — it is fundamentally about creating the right conditions for those people to work effectively together.
How leaders create psychological safety
- Model vulnerability — Acknowledge your own mistakes and uncertainties. When the leader says “I don’t know” or “I was wrong,” it signals that fallibility is acceptable.
- Frame failure as learning — Treat errors and setbacks as opportunities to improve, not as occasions for blame. Ask “What can we learn?” rather than “Who is responsible?”
- Invite input actively — Don’t just have an “open door” — actively solicit perspectives, especially from quieter team members. Ask specific questions rather than generic “Any thoughts?”
- Respond productively — When someone raises a concern or admits a mistake, respond with appreciation and curiosity, not with judgment. How the leader responds to the first person who speaks up determines whether others will follow.
Creating psychological safety is a leadership practice, not a one-time event. It requires consistent behavior over time. A single punitive response to a mistake can destroy months of trust-building work.
Note the connection to engaging leadership (Unit 4): facilitating (autonomy), connecting (relatedness), and strengthening (competence) all contribute to psychological safety. A disengaging leader who uses coercive, eroding, or isolating behaviors will systematically destroy it.
Psychological safety ≠ comfort zone
Psychological safety is not about lowering standards or avoiding disagreement.
The 2×2 framework (Edmondson, 1999):
| Low accountability | High accountability | |
|---|---|---|
| High psychological safety | Comfort zone — people feel safe but aren’t challenged | Learning zone — people feel safe AND are held to high standards |
| Low psychological safety | Apathy zone — people don’t care and aren’t pushed | Anxiety zone — people are stressed and afraid to take risks |
The goal is the learning zone: high psychological safety combined with high accountability and high performance standards.
This distinction is critical because psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as “being nice” or “avoiding difficult feedback.” In fact, the most effective teams combine psychological safety with rigorous standards — people feel safe to be candid because the team cares about quality, not despite it.
This connects to the team paradoxes we discussed earlier: foster support ⭤ foster confrontation. Psychological safety is what makes it possible to hold this paradox — to support people as human beings while confronting them about their work.
Diversity & inclusion in teams
Diversity as a team performance lever
Cognitive diversity — differences in perspectives, knowledge, heuristics, and interpretive frameworks — is a powerful resource for team problem-solving and innovation.
Demographic diversity — differences in identity characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, age, and cultural background — often (but not always) serves as a proxy for cognitive diversity.
Research distinguishes between these two forms of diversity because they have different mechanisms:
- Cognitive diversity directly enriches the team’s information pool and problem-solving capacity. When team members bring different mental models (recall Unit 1), the team can see problems from multiple angles — like the blind men who together can describe the whole elephant.
- Demographic diversity does not automatically produce cognitive diversity, but it often correlates with different life experiences, professional networks, and cultural perspectives that expand the team’s collective intelligence.
The key insight: diversity is a resource — but it is a resource that requires active management to realize its potential.
The diversity paradox
Diverse teams have higher potential and higher process loss.
The diversity paradox: diversity increases the range of perspectives, knowledge, and ideas available to the team, but it also increases the potential for misunderstanding, conflict, and coordination challenges.
- Diverse teams are better at generating creative solutions and avoiding groupthink
- But they can also experience more communication breakdowns, slower decision-making, and stronger in-group/out-group dynamics
- The difference between high-performing diverse teams and low-performing diverse teams is inclusion
The diversity paradox means that simply assembling a diverse team is not enough — and can even backfire if the team lacks inclusive practices. Without psychological safety and active inclusion, diverse team members may self-censor, disengage, or experience identity threat. The result: the team bears the coordination costs of diversity without reaping its cognitive benefits.
This is why psychological safety (the previous section) is a prerequisite for diversity to work: only when people feel safe to bring their full perspectives will cognitive diversity translate into better outcomes.
Inclusion as a leadership practice
Inclusion is what activates the potential of diversity. Leaders create inclusion through:
- Voice equity — ensuring that all team members have equal opportunity to contribute, not just the loudest or most senior voices
- Perspective-taking — actively seeking to understand others’ viewpoints and making this a team norm (“Before we decide, let’s hear from everyone”)
- Belonging cues — small but powerful signals that each member is valued and belongs (using names, acknowledging contributions, checking in)
- Constructive dissent norms — making it normal and expected to disagree respectfully, so that diverse perspectives actually surface
Inclusion connects directly to psychological safety — in fact, inclusion is psychological safety applied specifically to the challenge of diversity. A team that is psychologically safe but homogeneous misses the innovation benefits of diversity. A team that is diverse but psychologically unsafe suppresses the very perspectives that make diversity valuable. The sweet spot is diverse teams with high inclusion and psychological safety.
For leaders, this means that building a diverse team is only the first step. The harder, ongoing work is creating the conditions where diverse perspectives are genuinely heard, valued, and integrated into team decisions.
Leading virtual & distributed teams
Challenges of distance
Virtual and distributed teams face distinct challenges that amplify normal team dynamics:
- Reduced social cues — nonverbal communication, informal interactions, and spontaneous conversations are limited or absent
- Trust-building at distance — trust develops more slowly without face-to-face interaction and shared physical context
- Coordination costs — time zones, technology platforms, and asynchronous communication add friction to collaboration
- Isolation risk — remote team members may feel disconnected from the team and organization
These challenges are not merely inconveniences — they fundamentally affect team development dynamics. Virtual teams often struggle to move through the developmental stages (Wheelan, 2005) because the storming and norming processes that build trust and shared norms are harder to facilitate at a distance. Psychological safety is also more difficult to establish because leaders cannot easily read the room or notice when someone is disengaging.
This is where “digital leadership” (from Unit 1) becomes concrete: leading in the digital age increasingly means leading people you rarely or never see face-to-face.
Swift trust
Meyerson et al. (1996) introduced the concept of swift trust for temporary or virtual teams:
In the absence of time to build traditional trust through repeated interactions, team members make an initial decision to act as if trust exists — based on role expectations, professional reputation, and institutional cues.
Swift trust is fragile: it must be confirmed through early interactions and consistent follow-through. A single violation can shatter it entirely.
Swift trust helps explain why some virtual teams perform well from the start while others struggle. Teams that begin with clear role expectations, professional introductions that establish credibility, and early quick wins tend to develop and maintain swift trust. Teams that begin with ambiguity, missed deadlines, or unanswered messages quickly lose whatever initial trust existed.
For leaders, the implication is clear: the first interactions in a virtual team are disproportionately important. Invest heavily in structured kick-offs, explicit norm-setting, and early deliverables that build confidence.
Practical leadership practices for virtual teams
- Structured communication rhythms — establish regular check-ins, stand-ups, and retrospectives that create predictability and connection
- Explicit norms — make implicit expectations explicit (response time expectations, camera-on/off policies, decision-making processes) since unspoken norms cannot be absorbed through osmosis at a distance
- Intentional relationship building — create deliberate space for non-task interaction (virtual coffee chats, personal check-ins) that replaces the watercooler conversations lost in virtual settings
- Technology choices with purpose — match the communication tool to the message type (quick questions → chat; complex discussions → video; documentation → shared documents) rather than defaulting to the easiest option
Leading virtual teams requires more deliberate, structured leadership than leading co-located teams. What happens naturally in a shared office — relationship building, norm absorption, conflict resolution through informal conversation — must be intentionally designed in virtual settings.
This is also where the latticework of mental models pays off practically. Understanding team development stages helps you diagnose why a virtual team is struggling. Understanding psychological safety helps you design virtual meeting practices that invite voice. Understanding SDT (Unit 4) helps you create autonomy without losing connection. The models compound.
Team leadership exercise
Case-based exercise
Consider the following scenario:
A newly formed cross-functional project team has been tasked with developing a digital customer portal. The team includes members from IT, marketing, customer service, and finance — some co-located, some remote. After three weeks, the team leader observes the following:
- The IT and marketing members frequently clash over priorities
- Remote members rarely speak up in meetings
- The team has missed its first milestone
- One senior member dominates discussions
In small groups, diagnose the team’s situation and propose leadership interventions. Use the concepts from this unit (team development stage, psychological safety, diversity/inclusion, virtual team practices).
Expected diagnosis: the team is in Wheelan’s Stage 2 (counterdependency & fight), with low psychological safety and unmanaged diversity. The remote members’ silence suggests an inclusion problem amplified by distance.
Possible interventions: facilitate the IT-marketing conflict rather than suppress it (normalize storming); create explicit norms for meeting participation (e.g., round-robin input); establish structured one-on-ones with remote members; address the dominant senior member privately; run a brief retrospective to surface unspoken tensions.
Challenge groups to connect their proposals to specific concepts: Which CVF quadrant does each intervention represent? How does the intervention affect psychological safety? What Wheelan stage would the intervention move the team toward?
Latticework update
New models added to your latticework:
- Stages of group development (team as evolving system)
- Psychological safety as team learning enabler
- Complex adaptive systems — teams as emergent phenomena