Needle in a Haystack

My third blog concerns groups and how they work. As an outdoor instructor you will get a variety of groups to instruct as a result an understanding of how groups function can come in handy. Moorhead and Griffin (1998) defined a group as “two or more persons who interact with one another such that each person influences and is influenced by each other person”.

As an example I am going to use around 20 minutes of my final day in the Lake District. After completing my Mountain Leader training on the first 6 days of the trip we got back together with the rest of the group and decided to do a walk together. I went into a group of five males, 3 of whom including myself had taken part in the ML training and 2 who had not. The proposed route was to leave Seathwaite, go around the side of Great Gable, find Nape’s Needle then summit Great Gable via White Napes and continue along the ridge to Green Gable dropping back down into Seathwaite. Setting a fast pace to begin we set off, within a kilometre we began going steeply uphill, I personally found the pace to fast, told my friends/other members of the group and we slowed down only to speed up again within minutes. This carried on for ten to fifteen minutes until I'd had enough told them only to be called a number of names. I followed this by swearing and cursing the other members of the group. After this “incident” we slowed down to a manageable pace for the whole group and in the end achieved a good day on the hill apart from finding Nape’s Needle in the clag.

Within that twenty minute section of the day, we as a group went through most of Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) stages of group formation. These stages are; forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. At first we set up how the group was going to run, the forming stage. My outburst and the ensuing argument was the storming stage where according to Jarvis (1999) group members compete for status and settle into group roles. Stages three and four were where we worked together and achieved what we set out to do.

Another group formation theory is the Pendular Model (Budge 1981) which suggests that groups swing from cohesion to differentiation to conflict to resolution or back to cohesion hence the name Pendular model. Mills (1964) presented a life cycle model for groups and teams which like Tuckman’s had five stages. 1) encounter; 2) testing of boundaries; 3) creation of a normative system; 4) production and finally 5) separation and dissolution. In this situation Mills and Tuckmans theories are more applicable but Budge’s Pendular model is more accurate over a longer period such as an expedition.

Sport Psychology Matt Jarvis: Routledge (1999)


Sport Psychology: A Practical Guide Dr Arnold Leunes: Icon Books (2011)