Group and Systems Theory

Early Research on Groups

Understanding groups was the principal research preoccupation of the early pioneers of the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a novel interdisciplinary, action-oriented research organization founded in London in 1946 with the aid of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The sociological studies by Elton Mayo in the 1930s demonstrated that productivity in groups rose when group members took responsibility for the evaluation of their own work and for the standards of the working group. Other studies by Kurt Lewin and his associates showed that authoritarian leadership had a disintegrative effect on the structure of a group and a negative effect on its achievement. Lewin demonstrated that a decision made collectively by a group was of greater effectiveness in bringing about change in the behavior of individual members than was a request from an authority. During the late 1930s and 1940s, Lewin raised to a new level the social psychological study of group behavior. Other contributions to this field of study were Moreno, who introduced the idea of role-playing in 1947, and Bales, who pioneered techniques of interaction recording in 1943.

On the other side of the Atlantic, different kinds of insights into group behavior were developing out of the work of the Tavistock Clinic. This was partly in response to the huge need for psychological treatments of large numbers of discharged wartime soldiers and partly because of the independent advantages gained from creating conditions in which members of groups could together study the relations that developed in the treatment situation. Within British group psychotherapy at that time, an argument raged over whether a group was mainly the forum in which treatment of the individual took place, or whether, in assembling patients for treatment in a group, a deeper understanding was possible of the processes of groups of human beings engaged in common tasks. The most far-reaching formulations, which extended hypotheses about group processes to a level of explanation similar to that of psychoanalysis, were presented by British psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion in 1961.

Training programs in the study of group behavior developed along more or less parallel lines in the United States and Britain. In the United States, these occurred at the National Training Laboratory in Group Development at Bethel, Maine; Western Training Laboratory in Group Development at the University of California, and the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan. In Britain, a key role in studying group behavior and its application to the workplace was played by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in conjunction [Page 612]with the University of Leicester though the establishment of a series of residential conferences to study group dynamics, and with the European Productivity Agency, which was concerned with improving industrial training methods. Other organizations, like Ministry of Labour, the National Health Service, the British Institute of Management in the United Kingdom, and the Episcopal Church in the United States, were interested in the new knowledge on group behavior and in applying it to the study of organizations and the wider society.

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