Group Process

The Nature of the Group

A group becomes a group when a human collective takes some form of action. At this moment of action, a group's members may recognize one another as well as be recognized by others outside the group. This fact as well as a shared sense of commonality that stems from the action taken or to be taken creates the identity of the group. Once a group is a group, its survival depends on attending to some task to which the aggregate of individuals collectively attributes meaning and primacy. If there is a lack of clarity about meaning, sustained inactivity, or disagreement about the primacy of the task, the individuals who constitute the group are likely to exercise the freedom to devote their attention to other groups through which their needs can be expressed. Such attention can be direct, as in specific allegiance to a group, as well as indirect, as through identification with some group for its mission and purpose. In either case, the key is that individuals who constitute a group expend some form of energy toward the collective to give the group its identity and existence.

Leadership becomes a function of the group through how the group understands and seeks to carry out its task. Once the task is understood and delineated, the capacities of the various members of the group and the means by which the task is to be approached determines the emergence of leadership. This moment of emergence is what the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), a pioneer in the study of groups, called the creation of the work group. Such a group has a task to which some form of allegiance is established. The group continues to exist so long as its members recognize its primacy and the group affirms the members' needs. The quality of the group's leadership depends on the capacity of those who emerge to represent what the group understands itself to be and the action the group seeks to take.

According to Bion, the group has a fickle unconscious [Page 631]relationship with its leadership. Alongside the work group is the basic assumption group—the basic assumption being that the group is still attending to the task to which it has given primacy. What Bion observed is that the anxiety of sustaining attention on that task generates conflicts that are often left unexpressed and become enacted in characteristic task-avoidant ways.

Task Avoidance

Perhaps the most common form of task avoidance is dependency on the group's consciously or unconsciously designated leadership. Through this process, the group gives over its sense of responsibility for the collective task to the leadership. The leadership, having been entrusted with that responsibility, develops a sense of grandiosity and omnipotence. The task becomes lost when those in leadership mistake the power conferred on them for some inherent, irreplaceable capacity within themselves. In the worst cases, leadership is replaced by despotism and the original task is lost, the leadership's aim having become instead the repressive maintenance of power. In other instances, the group withdraws its support from the leadership because of collective disappointment resulting from the leadership's inability to meet the needs of the group. In either instance, the task and the meaning that brought the group together are lost.

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