Towards a group analytic praxis for working with teams in organizations II

Abstract

In the first part of this article, I argued that several aspects of group analysis render it a useful discipline for consulting to organizations and working with teams in complex post-modern environments: attention to the individual in the group, sophisticated grasp of the nuances of interpersonal communication, attention to context, tolerance and value of multiple perspectives, creative incorporation of difference, and a flexible developmental approach to managing anxiety and leadership projections. I also presented several key factors of contextual difference, important when working with a team: the different purpose of the work to facilitate more effective working together between members; stated outcomes (usually) for the intervention and often a relatively short, or fixed, time frame; that the group is not necessarily small, so that median or large group dynamics come into play; that the analyst arrives as the ‘stranger’, even when an ‘expert’, rather than as the powerful central figure of an analytic therapy group; that the formal hierarchy interacts in complex ways with power dynamics in the group, including the analyst; and that the language and metaphor of the intervention must be specific and meaningful to the team.