The mutual selection of team members and the events in the forming phase have significance in at least three important dimensions. They both define the roles and responsibilities and their matching to team members, often based on interest in the project and background experience. In addition, personal goals might play into both the selection itself and the subsequent matching.
The selection and the matching process that lead to the formation of roles and responsibilities can have a significant influence on the level of trust team members feel for each other. Trust has been established as the basis for constructive team work (Lencioni 2002).
Finally, the formation phase of a team often falls together with the starting phase of a project – a team gets formed to pursue a project –, and thus the content the team will work on also gets defined in the same phase. Even if this happens on an abstract vision level in the beginning, it will often set the direction and the tone of further work.
Thus, we can integrate the Form:
[…]
The formation phase of an agile team is therefore a phase where openness to the definition of working modes and content is expected of team members, not least by the frameworks in use. This is typically less the case later in the course of a project. Even though some frameworks (e. g. Osterwalder et al. 2014) suggest to also focus on counterindications to the current path of a project, the general expectation of a development project for a product is to get to a releasable state as soon as possible (cf. Maurya 2012). This context might play into the dynamics in the observed self-descriptions of teams. Any significant change in the direction of a project requires considerable communication overhead and effort on the part of all team members. As this is not a regular part of agile frameworks, team members do not expect to invest this energy into the team and project once they are formed.
Nevertheless, in the agile working field of practice, some dynamic of team development is expected. Most notably, the four-step developmental framework introduced by Bruce Tuckman (1965) is prevalent. It describes the four phases of team development as forming, storming, norming, and performing. The forming phase sees the selection of team members and some initial definition of roles and responsibilities. Teams then start to work together until discrepancies between personal goals of team members surface and become a source of Conflict. In this storming phase, conflicts can often hinder team productivity significantly. As a reaction, norms are introduced to mitigate the differences among the goals of the team members.
Conflicts are settled by the creation of compromises and new rules. As the team learns to work based on these rules, they become less and less explicit in the day-to-day teamwork. Finally, in the performing phase, rules are followed implicitly, and the team realizes its productivity potential. However, numerous revisits of the framework also point out that any small change in the setup or composition of a team might throw it back from performing into forming or storming (Atlassian n.d.).
In 1977, Bruce Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning or mourning, to the model (Tuckman/Jensen 1977). This is the phase at the end of a project or team phase, when the team members mourn the end of their collaboration. In agile ways of working, there are attempts to circumvent the troubles and perceived productivity losses of the forming and storming phases by focusing on explicit norming directly at the outset of team formation (cf. Agile Alliance 2019).
The hypothesis at the outset of this study was that the morphogenesis observed in teams’ self-descriptions might be matched to specific development stages of teamwork as they have been described in literature, e. g. by Tuckman and Jensen (1977), and to specific phases in restrictions due to the COVID pandemic.
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GROTE, Florian, 2023. Distinction Dynamics: A Form Analysis of Self-Descriptions in Agile Teams. Soziale Systeme. 25 June 2023. Vol. 28, no. 1, p. 130–162. DOI 10.1515/sosys-2023-0008. page 
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