Theories of Group Development and Categories for Interaction Analysis

Although some interest in the stages of group development can be traced in the writings of behavioral scientists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s (see Coyle, 1930), the first studies which caught the attention of a number of group observers, leaders, and therapists were the works of Bales (1950) and Bion in 1948-1951 (see Bion, 1961). Their work, along with that of about 50 others, was summarized by Tuckman (1965) in the first major review of stud-ies of group development. He reviewed studies drawn from four somewhat distinct fields: therapy groups, training groups (i.e., educational groups con-ducted with a nondirective leader in group dynamics tradition), natural groups, and laboratory groups. From these various studies, he abstracted a theory of four stages of group development. After Tuckman began his review, studies were published by Dunphy (1964), Mills (1964), Slater (1966), and Mann (1967). They used observa-tions of a version of the training group developed at Harvard University (Social Relations 120) to generate theories of development which combined elements of Bales and Bion, as well as other themes. The theories of group development of most of the major authors have been associated with the category systems for the observation of interpersonal behav-ior, which could be used to test or illustrate the theories. Over the same period of time that theories of development were being proposed, some of the same authors, as well as others, were making refinements in various category systems with the intention of discovering the smallest number of dimensions that would be necessary to describe most of the variance in interpersonal behavior. Promi-nent among these were Chapple and his associates (Matarazzo et al., 1957),