What happens to the team during teambuilding? Examining the change process that helps to build a team

For many years there has been a preoccupation with the need to evaluate the effectiveness of team building interventions (TBIs) in organizational development projects. Often these evaluations attempt some kind of measurement of the team before and after the team‐building event in order to measure any change in skills or attitudes. Such work has several potentially valuable outcomes. However, such research often has had mixed success in gathering or assessing data that would serve as conclusive (“bottom line”) proof in these cases. Much of the research does not even attempt an evaluation. It may be that the nature of the phenomena under investigation itself, or the circumstances under which data are collected, is not amenable to that kind of analysis. The starting point for this paper then, is twofold: (1) if it has proved elusive and largely fruitless to try to evaluate team building in these ways; maybe there is a better and more useful way to examine the action that takes place on TBIs?; and; (2) if it is the case that team building is often an intervention that in practice turns out to be less than permanent (and perhaps even damaging), what can be done to help overcome this problem? Takes the view that to try and assess the effectiveness of the team building event per se is to treat the team after the team‐building event as a finished product. Instead, the team‐building intervention is seen as a start, with the team in the process of becoming. Sees the team as a dynamic entity, always under flux and adapting to its circumstances. Postulates that if we can identify what is happening both within the team and to the individuals involved during a team‐building event that sparks off this process of becoming an effective team, then this might gives assistance to the organization as to what kinds of support, practices and resources they might be able to offer the team on its return to ensure the becoming continues. Data were collected from 22 full‐time MBA students on a three‐day outward bound residential course via an open‐ended questionnaire. Each student was asked to recount, in their own words, positive and negative events on a daily basis and consider whether anything had changed regarding themselves or the team. Examines emergent themes in a discursive way and proposes tentative recommendations in what is a preliminary study in an ongoing piece of work.