As the group solves the problem of authority, begins to share leadership, and accomplishes some tasks successfully, it begins to operate in terms of another unconscious assumptions that we are the best group, and we all like each other. Turquet (1973) used the term fusion to reflect a strong emotional need to feel merged with the group and to deny internal differences.
If this assumption is operating, at the overt behavior level, we observe a marked absence of interpersonal conflict, a tendency to bend over backward to be nice to each other, emotional expressions of affection, a mood of euphoria, and a group solidarity in the face of any challenge. Symptoms of conflict or lack of harmony are ignored or actively denied. Hostility is suppressed or punished severely if it occurs. An image of solidarity must be presented at all costs.
Different members of the group will vary in their need to attain and maintain a high level of intimacy, and those who care most, the “overpersonals” will become the most active guardians of the group harmony image and will suppress the “counter-personals” who are made anxious by the implied level of intimacy. In particular, some members will resolve conflicts about intimacy by seeking it and by attempting to maintain harmony at all costs. But other group members, those who resolve their conflict about intimacy by avoiding it, will rock the boat and challenge the harmony image because the harmony makes them anxious. They will complain that the group is wasting time, is being too “cozy,” and is ignoring conflicts that are visible. But their complaints will be ignored or actively put down if the need to prove group harmony is strong.
The staff member is now “one of the regulars” and is labeled as “no different from the rest of us,” which is, of course, just as unrealistic as the assumption that the staff member is omniscient and omnipotent. At this stage, interventions that may be disturbing to the group are simply ignored or laughed off.
The strength of the fusion assumption will be a function of the individual needs of group members and the actual experience of the group. The more the group feels itself to be in a hostile environment or vulnerable to destruction, the more it may cling to the assumption as a way of claiming strength. Or, to put it the other way, only when the group feels reasonably secure can it give up the false solidarity that the fusion assumption claims. Such security comes gradually from increasing experience, success with tasks, and tests of strength against other groups.
The group moods of “fight” or “flight” are likely to arise around the fusion assumption because both fight and flight involve solidarity and joint action. Thus, if the authority issue arises again, the group may at this point turn collectively against the staff member or may deliberately run away from its real task of learning about itself by rationalizing that it has overcome all of its problems already, that there is nothing more to learn. Or the group may project its negative feelings onto someone outside the group— the administration of the workshop or some other group—and fight or flee from that outside enemy.
What Bion (1959) called pairing is also common at this stage because the need for love and intimacy that is operating can easily be projected onto those members who display such feelings overtly. By projecting the fate of the group into the “pair,” by hoping for a magic solution through what the pair will produce, the group can maintain its sense of solidarity. All these responses preserve the assumption that “we are a great group, we like each other, and we can do great things together.”
Many organizations get stuck at this level of group evolution, developing an adequate authority system and a capacity to defend themselves against external threat but never growing internally to a point of differentiation of roles and clarification of personal relationships.
1. Reality Test and Catharsis
The fusion assumption will not be given up until some marker event brings its falsity into consciousness. There are four group events that have the potential for revealing the assumption: (1) Disagreements and conflicts will occur in the attempts to take joint action, (2) noticeable avoidance of confrontation, (3) overt denial of the fact that some members may not like each other, and (4) eruptions of negative feelings toward other members. The actual marker event that tests the reality of the fusion assumption is most likely to come from those group members who are least conflicted about intimacy issues and who, therefore, are most likely to have insight into what is happening. For example, on one of the many occasions when a “counter-personal” member challenges the solidarity of the group, one of the less conflicted members may support the challenge by providing incontrovertible examples indicating that group members actually do not seem to get along all that well. This introduction of data that cannot be denied will pierce the illusion and thus force the recognition of the assumption.
Realistic norms about intimacy will evolve around incidents that involve aggression and affection. For example, if member A strongly attacks member B, it is what the rest of the group does immediately after the attack that will create a norm. The group may immediately move on to another topic or someone may actually say, “We should not attack each other,” and the group may send signals of approval. The norm we should not attack each other in this group begins to form. Or the group may join in the attack leading to the norm that attacking members is okay in this group. Similarly if one member expresses a higher degree of intimacy by saying to another member something like, “I really like you and want to get to know you much better,” what others do immediately after that will determine whether the group moves toward more intimate revelations or sets the norm that we don’t get into very personal stuff in this group.
At some point in this exploration, members will realize that not only is liking and disliking each other highly variable within the group but, even more important, liking each other is not the learning goal of this group. Instead, members realize that they need to accept each other enough to enable learning and joint task performance. Liking and personally more intimate relationships may occur, especially outside the group meetings, but within the group, they only need to be intimate enough to enable the group to fulfill its mission of learning. A crucial learning is that a person can accept and work with another person without having to like him or her.
I have frequently observed similar events in more formally constituted groups. A work group in a growing company erupts into a hostile confrontation between two members. The manner in which the group handles the ensuing tense silence builds a norm for future expressions of feeling. If the group or the leader punishes either or both combatants, norms get built that feelings should be kept in check; if the group or leader encourages resolution, norms get built that hostility is okay and that feelings can be expressed, as was consistently the case in DEC. The moments when these norm-building activities occur are often very brief and easy to miss if one is not alert to them. But it is at those moments that culture begins to form, and the eventual assumptions about what is appropriate and right will reflect a long series of such incidents and the reactions to them.
The T-groups differed greatly in the degree of intimacy that evolved in them just as they differed in the kind of influence and authority system they evolved. Such differences reflected both the personalities of staff members and participants, and the actual experiences of the groups in their efforts to learn. But all groups developed fairly stable norms that collectively could be labeled microcultures. The evidence for this conclusion was the observed differences in how the groups dealt with tasks that the workshop required them to perform and in how it felt when visiting a group.
2. Which Norms Survive? The Role of Experience and Learning
How are norms reinforced and built up into the assumptions that eventually come to be taken for granted? The two basic mechanisms of learning involved are (1) positive problem solving to cope with external survival issues, and (2) anxiety avoidance to cope with internal integration issues. For example, if a group challenges its formal leader and begins to build norms that support more widely shared leadership and higher levels of member involvement, it is an empirical matter whether or not this way of working is effective in solving real-world problems. In the T-group, members decide whether or not they feel that such norms are enabling them to fulfill their primary task of learning. In formal work groups, it is a matter of actual experience whether or not the work gets done better with a given set of norms that have evolved.
If the group fails repeatedly or is chronically uncomfortable, sooner or later someone will propose that a new leadership process be found or that the original leader be reinstated in a more powerful role, and the group will find itself experimenting again with new behaviors that lead to new norms of how to work with authority. It then again must test against reality how successful it is. The norms that produce the greatest success will survive. As they continue to work, they gradually turn into assumptions about how things really are and should be. As new norms form around authority, there is also an immediate test of whether the members of the group are more or less comfortable as a result of the new way of working. Do the new norms enable them to avoid the anxiety inherent in the initially unstable or uncertain situation? If the leader is challenged, gives up some authority, and shares power with the group, some group members, depending on their own pattern of needs and prior experiences, may feel less comfortable than before. In some groups, a greater comfort level might be achieved by norms that, in effect, reassert the authority of the leader and make members more dependent on the leader and less intimate with each other. The needs of the leader will also play a role in this process, so the ultimate resolution— what makes everyone most comfortable—will be a set of norms that meets the many internal needs as well as the external experiences. Because so many variables are involved, the resultant group culture will usually be a unique and distinctive one.
The stability of the assumptions that evolve out of a group ’s experience will reflect whether or not the learning has been primarily the result of success or the avoidance of failure. If a group has learned primarily through positive successes, the mentality will be “Why change something that has been successful?” However, if what the group does ceases to be successful, that will be visible and will be a potential stimulus to change and new learning. If a group has learned something in order to avoid pain or failure, the mentality will be “We must avoid what has hurt us in the past,” which will prevent trying out new things and thus discovering that they may not any longer be hurtful. Assumptions about what to avoid are, therefore, more stable than assumptions based on success. At the personal level, we know this from how phobias work in our own experience.
Source: Schein Edgar H. (2010), Organizational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass; 4th edition.
An interesting discussion is worth comment. I think that you should write more on this topic, it might not be a taboo subject but generally people are not enough to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers