Team

How do teams develop, and what makes them effective?

Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

February 16, 2026

Introduction

Today’s session

• Warm-up 15 min
• Team development models 30 min
• Psychological safety 25 min
• Break
• Diversity & inclusion 25 min
• Virtual teams & case exercise 25 min
• Reflection & closing 10 min

Learning objectives

After completing this unit, you will be able to:

1. Explain team development stages and the shifting leadership role across them.
2. Define psychological safety and describe its impact on team learning and performance.
3. Analyze the diversity paradox and the role of inclusion in activating diverse teams.
4. Propose leadership practices for building trust and effectiveness in virtual and distributed teams.

Warm-up

Individual reflection

Think about the best team and worst team you have ever been part of.

03:00

Best team

What made your best team great?

03:00

Write down on the whiteboard (left col)

Worst team

What made your worst team terrible?

03:00

Write down on the whiteboard (right col)

Differences

What does the **leader do*+ in great teams vs. terrible teams?

05:00

Expected: trust, communication, psychological safety, role clarity, shared purpose, leadership quality.

Teams are complex adaptive systems. Small changes in trust, communication, or norms can create reinforcing loops — for better or worse.

Effective teams

Characteristics

According to Hill (2003), an effective team does not only involve team performance, but is characterized by three criteria:

1. The team performs: the output meets the standards of those who have to use it
2. The team members are satisfied and learn (i.e., the team experience contributes to each member’s personal well-being and development)
3. 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, but that sustainability and growth matter equally.

Mini-lecture (3 min).

Emphasize that most organizations focus only on criterion 1 (performance). But a team that delivers results while burning out its members or failing to build capacity for the future is not truly effective.

Connect to engaging leadership: engaging leaders attend to all three criteria — facilitating performance, strengthening competence, and connecting members.

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.

Mini-lecture (3 min).

Connect to Unit 3: these are the same paradox dynamics, now applied at the team level. The CVF quadrants map directly: collaborate ↔︎ compete, create ↔︎ control. No single quadrant suffices for complex team leadership.

Team development

Tuckman’s stage model

Tuckman (1965) proposed that teams progress through predictable stages:

Forming — Storming — Norming — Performing — Adjourning¹.

Mini-lecture (5 min).

Walk through each stage briefly:

• Forming: politeness, uncertainty, dependence on the leader.
• Storming: conflict emerges, members assert perspectives. Most uncomfortable but most critical.
• Norming: shared norms, roles, and ways of working develop.
• Performing: high-level functioning, interdependence, flexibility.
• Adjourning: reflection, celebration, sometimes grief.

Limitation: implies linear progression that many teams don’t follow. Teams can regress when facing new challenges.

Wheelan’s Integrated Model of Group Development

The Integrated Model of Group Development (IMGD) (Wheelan, 2005) provides an empirically grounded refinement of Tuckman’s stages:

Stage	Focus	Key behaviors
(1) Dependency & inclusion	Will I belong?	Members look to the leader for direction; communication is tentative; conflict is avoided
(2) Counterdependency & fight	Who has influence?	Members challenge the leader and each other; subgroups form; conflict over values and procedures
(3) Trust & structure	How do we work together?	Mature negotiation of roles, norms, and goals; increased trust and open communication
(4) Work & productivity	Let’s get it done.	High task focus; effective collaboration; flexible role allocation; constructive conflict

Table 1: Stages of group development as proposed by the IMGD (Wheelan, 2005)

Mini-lecture (5 min).

Key nuances beyond Tuckman:

1. Teams don’t progress linearly — they can regress when facing membership changes or new tasks.
2. Most teams never reach Stage 4.
3. Time matters — teams need sufficient time together.
4. The leader’s role shifts across stages.

This shifting role connects to situational leadership (Unit 3): directive → coaching → supporting → delegating maps onto development stages.

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

Table 2: The leader’s role across stages

Mini-lecture (3 min).

This maps onto the situational leadership model from Unit 3 (Hersey & Blanchard, 1977). The leader does not become less important — but the nature of the contribution changes from providing answers to creating conditions.

Also adaptive leadership in action: in early stages, challenges are mostly technical. As the team matures, challenges become more adaptive.

Exercise

What stage is this team in?

Read each brief scenario and diagnose:
What Wheelan stage?
What leadership approach is needed?

1. Team members defer all decisions to the project manager. Nobody pushes back.
2. Two subgroups have formed and argue about the project approach in every meeting.
3. The team has developed clear sprint rituals and members freely pick up each other’s tasks.

12:00

Expected answers:

1. Stage 1 (Dependency) — needs directive leadership, clear structure
2. Stage 2 (Counterdependency) — needs coaching, normalize the conflict
3. Stage 4 (Work & productivity) — needs delegating, boundary management

Transition: “What enables teams to move from Stage 2 to Stage 3? The answer, research shows, is psychological safety.”

Psychological safety

Definition

Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (A. Edmondson, 1999).

A. Edmondson (1999) showed that psychological safety enables learning behavior in teams — asking questions, admitting mistakes, seeking feedback, experimenting — which in turn drives team performance.

Mini-lecture (5 min).

The research began with a puzzling finding: the best-performing hospital teams reported more errors. It turned out they had higher psychological safety, so members felt safe to report and discuss errors — leading to more learning and fewer repeated mistakes.

Key insight: psychological safety is not about being nice. It is about creating an environment where people feel safe to be candid.

The research evidence

Project Aristotle

Google’s Project Aristotle² confirmed and extended these findings (Google re:Work, 2015):

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):

1. Psychological safety — Can we take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
2. Dependability — Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
3. Structure & clarity — Are goals, roles, and plans clear?
4. Meaning — Is the work personally important to us?
5. Impact — Do we believe our work matters?

Mini-lecture (3 min).

Project Aristotle studied 180+ teams over two years. They expected team composition to be key — instead, how teams worked together mattered far more than who was on the team.

This reinforces a key course message: leadership is not just about selecting the right people (traits, Unit 2) — it is about creating the right conditions.

Creating psychological safety

A. C. Edmondson (2018) proposed three categories of action in her “Leader Tool Kit”:

• Setting the Stage creates the rationale for speaking up.
• Inviting Participation creates the opportunity to speak up.
• Responding Productively creates the orientation for continued speaking up.

Mini-lecture (3 min).

Creating psychological safety is a leadership practice, not a one-time event. A single punitive response to a mistake can destroy months of trust-building.

Connect to engaging leadership (Unit 4): facilitating (autonomy), connecting (relatedness), and strengthening (competence) all contribute to psychological safety. Disengaging leadership destroys it.

Psychological safety ≠ comfort zone

Psychological safety is not about lowering standards or avoiding disagreement.

	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

Table 3: The 2×2 framework of psychological safety (A. Edmondson, 1999)

The goal is the learning zone: high psychological safety combined with high accountability and high performance standards.

Psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as “being nice.” In fact, the most effective teams combine safety with rigorous standards. This connects to team paradoxes: foster support ⭤ foster confrontation.

Discussion

How would you move a team from the anxiety zone to the learning zone?

05:00

Diversity & inclusion

Diversity x team performance

The diversity paradox

Diverse teams have higher potential
and higher process loss.

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 (Stahl et al., 2010).

• 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
• Knippenberg et al. (2004) shows that inclusion (i.e., avoiding “social categorization”) is the mechanism that allows teams to elaborate on their differences rather than clashing over them

Mini-lecture (5 min).

Simply assembling a diverse team is not enough — and can backfire without inclusive practices. Without psychological safety, diverse members may self-censor or disengage. The team bears the coordination costs without reaping cognitive benefits.

This is why psychological safety is a prerequisite for diversity to work.

Inclusion

Inclusion is the set of leadership practices that activate the latent potential of a diverse team. Leaders bridge the gap between “having a seat at the table” and “having a voice that carries weight” through:

• Voice Equity: mitigating “dominance hierarchies” to ensure participation is distributed, regardless of status or seniority (A. C. Edmondson, 2018).
• Perspective-raking: the cognitive process of stepping into another’s shoes, which reduces bias and improves “information elaboration” (Galinsky et al., 2008).
• Belonging Cues: high-frequency social signals that create a “safe connection,” signaling that the individual is a vital part of the future of the group (Coyle, 2018).
• Constructive Dissent Norms: institutionalizing “task conflict” while minimizing “relationship conflict” to surface unique perspectives (Jehn, 1995).

Mini-lecture (3 min).

Inclusion connects directly to psychological safety — inclusion is psychological safety applied to the challenge of diversity. A psychologically safe but homogeneous team misses innovation benefits. A diverse but unsafe team suppresses the very perspectives that make diversity valuable.

Exercise

Analyze and propose interventions.

• Scenario A: In a product team, the three engineers dominate technical discussions while two designers rarely speak. Recent design decisions have been technically sound but user experience has suffered.
• Scenario B: A global marketing team has members from 5 countries. Video calls are always led by the US-based members, with Asian team members rarely contributing until asked directly.

For each discuss in groups of 3

• What is the inclusion problem?
• What specific practices would you implement?

08:00

Group exercise (12 min: 8 min groups, 4 min plenary).

Expected analysis:

• Scenario A: Voice equity problem. Solutions: rotate facilitation, structured input rounds, separate design reviews.
• Scenario B: Cultural + power distance issue. Solutions: async input before calls, rotating time zones, explicit norms for contribution, check-ins with quieter members.

Push groups to connect solutions to specific concepts: psychological safety, engaging leadership, CVF quadrants.

Virtual teams

Challenges of distance

Distance is not just a geographical gap; it is a “functional barrier” that forces a shift from organic interaction to intentional leadership.

• Reduced Social Context: the lack of “media richness” (nonverbal cues/tone) increases the risk of misinterpretation and attribution bias (Daft & Lengel, 1986).
• Fragility of “Swift Trust”: distance shifts trust from interpersonal (affect-based) to task-based (reliability), making it harder to sustain over time (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999).
• Coordination Complexity: distance creates “structural holes” (gaps in the flow of information) that prevent the team from picking up social cues organically. This forces a shift from implicit coordination (natural alignment) to explicit coordination (intentional, documented protocols) to bridge the gap (Hinds & Mortensen, 2005).
• Social Loafing & Isolation: physical distance can lead to “psychological distance,” where team members feel less accountable and more disconnected from the collective identity (Golden et al., 2008).

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.

Mini-lecture (3 min).

Swift trust explains why some virtual teams perform well from the start while others struggle. Teams that begin with clear role expectations, professional introductions, and early quick wins maintain trust. Teams that begin with ambiguity and missed deadlines quickly lose it.

For leaders: the first interactions in a virtual team are disproportionately important.

Leading virtual teams

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 coffee-machine conversations lost in virtual settings
• Technology choices with purpose — match the communication tool to the message type (quick questions in chat; complex discussions per video; documentation in shared documents only) rather than defaulting to the easiest option

Mini-lecture (3 min).

Leading virtual teams requires more deliberate, structured leadership than co-located teams. What happens naturally in a shared office must be intentionally designed.

Connect to the latticework: understanding team stages helps diagnose virtual team struggles. Understanding psychological safety helps design meeting practices. Understanding SDT (Unit 4) helps create autonomy without losing connection.

Integrated case exercise

Diagnose the team and propose interventions.

A newly formed cross-functional project team has been tasked with developing a digital customer portal. Members from IT, marketing, customer service, and finance — some co-located, some remote. After three weeks:

• 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

08:00

• What Wheelan stage is this team in?
• Where is psychological safety breaking down?
• What inclusion problems are visible?
• What should the leader do differently?

Expected diagnosis: Stage 2 (counterdependency & fight), low psychological safety, unmanaged diversity, virtual team inclusion problems.

Reflection & closing

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

• Behavioral complexity applies to team leadership — different stages require different approaches.
• Engaging leadership creates the conditions for psychological safety.
• Feedback loops: psychological safety → learning behavior → performance → reinforced safety.

Closing quote

Psychological safety is not about being nice — it is about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other (A. Edmondson, 1999).

Q&A

Open the floor for remaining questions.

Homework

Reflect on a conflict you have observed in a team or organization:

• What were the sources of the conflict (structural, interpersonal, resource-based)?
• Was the conflict functional (productive) or dysfunctional (destructive)?
• How was it managed — and what would you have done differently?

Literature

Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. Bantam.

Daft, R. L., & Lengel, R. H. (1986). Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. Management Science, 32(5), 554–571.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons.

Galinsky, A. D., Maddux, W. W., Gilin, D., & White, J. B. (2008). Why it pays to get inside the head of your opponent: The differential effects of perspective taking and empathy in negotiations. Psychological Science, 19(4), 378–384.

Golden, T. D., Veiga, J. F., & Dino, R. N. (2008). The impact of professional isolation on teleworker job performance and turnover intentions: Does time spent teleworking, face-to-face interactions, and social support matter? Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(6), 1412–1421.

Google re:Work. (2015). Guide: Understand team effectiveness. https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/

Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1977). Management of organizational behavior: Utilizing human resources (3rd ed.). Prentice-Hall.

Hill, L. A. (2003). Becoming a manager: How new managers master the challenges of leadership. Harvard Business Press.

Hinds, P. J., & Mortensen, M. (2005). Understanding conflict in geographically distributed teams: The moderating effects of shared identity and shared context. Organization Science, 16(3), 290–307.

Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Leidner, D. E. (1999). Communication and trust in global virtual teams. Organization Science, 10(6), 791–815.

Jehn, K. A. (1995). A multimethod examination of the nature, causes, and effects of task and relationship conflict. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(2), 256–282.

Knippenberg, D. van, De Dreu, C. K. W., & Homan, A. C. (2004). Work group diversity and group performance: An integrative model and research agenda. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(6), 1008–1022.

Meyerson, D., Weick, K. E., & Kramer, R. M. (1996). Swift trust and temporary groups. In Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research (pp. 166–195). Sage Publications.

Stahl, G. K., Maznevski, M. L., Voigt, A., & Jonsen, K. (2010). Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A meta-analysis. Journal of International Business Studies, 41, 690–709.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399.

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of small-group development revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(4), 419–427.

Wheelan, S. A. (2005). Group processes: A developmental perspective (2nd ed.). Allyn & Bacon.

Footnotes

1. Ajourning was added by Tuckman & Jensen (1977)

2. Google’s Project Aristotle refers to a large-scale internal study of team effectiveness