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This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 10-12, 1987 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

The theory of health care team development is derived from group development theories, which propose that groups pass through a set of stages before reaching their maximum state of task effectiveness and solidarity. Based on reviews of theories and research, Tuckman (1965 and 1977) found that most theorists propose four major stages of group development: 1) Orientation and Dependency, 2) Polarization, 3) Cohesion and 4) Functional Role Relatedness. For the most part, the theories of group development have been built by inductive, qualitative analysis of case studies. Each theorist has proposed a complex set of behaviors and motivational patterns that characterize the stages of development.
Other more systematic studies (Mills, 1964; Mann, 1967; Farrell, 1976) have made use of content analytic methods to test the theories and attempt to map more precisely the communication patterns and informal roles that characterize the stages. However, the expense of this method and the difficulty of using it in field settings has hindered the progress of research and theory-building. In this paper we report on our assessments of the validity of a new index of team development which can more readily be used in field settings as an indicator of the stage of team development. First, we present the theory behind the index; then we present the method of calculating the index. Finally, we present a test of the validity of the index as an indicator of the degree to which teams approach the stage of maximal task effectiveness.