Sarah J. Brazaitis
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
—Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
Benjamin Franklin spoke these words at one of the most important moments in the history of the United States as a reminder to his colleagues that the colonies must remain united or risk death for treason against the king of England. He was calling for collaboration and unity, essential characteristics of an effective group. The founding fathers of the United States certainly needed to be an efficacious group in order to establish a new nation, but their group was not without conflict. Indeed, their opinions diverged on several critical issues, such as relations among the emerging states and themselves and between the states and foreign powers. But they also appealed to common principles and a shared vision for a new entity, free from an oppressive monarchy. In some ways, this extraordinary group was also ordinary: it was a group with immense talent as well as significant conflict.
Groups can vary by many factors, including goals and tasks, membership, duration, and leadership structure. They may work toward something as transformative as nation building or as ordinary as choosing new office space. Yet all groups have conflict (Levi, 2011). Conflict in groups is sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive, often a nuisance, but certainly unavoidable (Deutsch, 1973).
In over a decade of consulting to organizations on groups, I have witnessed firsthand numerous group conflicts, some constructive and some destructive. In fifteen years of teaching a graduate-level group dynamics course, I have heard about hundreds more—again, some that helped the group move forward, others that obstructed the group’s work or forced its premature disbandment. Much has been studied and written about regarding group dynamics in conflict resolution (see Tindale, Dykema-Engblade, and Wittkowski, 2005, for a review). The focus of this chapter is a discussion of a group relations framework for looking at conflict and a group relations model for conflict resolution in groups.
The field of group relations combines theory and research from open systems and psychodynamic perspectives in studying groups, and its ideas and concepts are widely used internationally to understand group, team, and social system processes, often as part of organizational development and consulting work (Agazarian, 2005; Geller, 2005). Central to the group relations perspective is that covert and irrational processes underlie group and organizational life, and understanding these processes engenders optimal group and organizational functioning. In addition, the notion of organizations as open systems is a fundamental tenet of group relations (Rice, 1965; Rioch, 1975; Geller, 2005). This chapter delineates a taxonomy for understanding conflict in groups and offers a framework to resolve it from a group relations perspective.
The group relations taxonomy for examining conflict in groups is the five levels of organizational processes (Wells, 1995): intrapersonal, interpersonal, group-as-a-whole or group-centered, intergroup, and interorganizational. I use a case study from my consulting practice to illustrate these concepts. I also describe a model I have developed and used in my group work toward conflict resolution from a group relations perspective. This model combines the use of BART in examining a group’s boundaries, authority, roles, and tasks (Brazaitis and Gushue, 2004; Green and Molenkamp, 2005; Hayden and Molenkamp, 2004; Noumair, 2013) across Wells’s five levels of organizational analysis (1995) as a means of resolving group conflict. This chapter therefore is an examination of conflict and conflict resolution from a specific group relations perspective.
One of the most influential contributors to the study of group dynamics was Kurt Lewin, who is said to be the field’s founder (Forsyth and Burnette, 2005). Lewin fled Nazi Germany in 1932 and settled in the United States, first at the University of Iowa and eventually at MIT, where he started the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) in 1945. Lewin was strongly influenced by his experiences of living under fascism in Europe and of having to flee Nazi Germany for the United States prior to World War II. As a result of these experiences, he was deeply concerned with social change and social action through action research (Deutsch, 1992). For Lewin, it was imperative to link basic and applied research with the goal of developing theories that can be applied to important social problems (Deutsch, 1954).
Lewin’s research produced groundbreaking ideas about groups, including his famous psychological model of human behavior, field theory. Field theory is the idea that individuals and groups interact with their environment in a dynamic interplay of psychological and social forces (Lewin, 1951). Studying groups, then, necessitates studying the social and psychological forces in which those groups and their individual members are embedded. Lewin summarized this view of interactionism with his formula B = f {P, E }: behavior (B ) is a function of the interaction of personality (P ) and environment (E ), a premise that remains at the core of group process research today. At the RCGD, Lewin assembled a network of graduate students, researchers, and practitioners who proceeded to produce some of the most influential theoretical and empirical work in the field of group dynamics and social psychology (Deutsch, 1999; Forsyth and Burnette, 2005), including social comparison and dissonance theory (Festinger, 1954, 1957), communication and cohesion in groups (Schachter, 1951, 1959), exchange theory (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959), groups as change agents (Back, 1972), power in groups (French, 1956), motives and goals in groups (Zander, 1996), group cohesion (Cartwright, 1968), and conflict and cooperation (Deutsch, 1949a, 1949b), which is especially relevant to this chapter.
Lewin was also responsible for the first T-group (training group), which led to creation of the National Training Laboratory in Group Development (NTL), an organization that continues to offer workshops and training to improve interpersonal and group skills. This first T-group sprang from a meeting at the Connecticut Workshop on Intergroup Relations in 1946 where Lewin had assembled a staff of scholars and practitioners from RCGD, including Ron Lippitt, Ken Benne, Lee Bradford, Murray Horowitz, Mef Seeman, and Morton Deutsch, to help train leaders to manage intergroup tensions in their communities (Deutsch, 1999; Highhouse, 2002). One evening, after a long workshop day, the training and research staff members were discussing their impressions of the interaction patterns and other process observations of the group meetings that day. Workshop participants who were present at this discussion asked to join in. Lewin agreed it might be productive. Indeed, it was. The lively, rich conversation that followed was later hallmarked as the genesis of the T-group as the staff and participants openly discussed the group members’ behavior and its impact. NTL began offering sensitivity training in earnest in 1947 with a focus on learning in real time about the effect of one’s behavior in groups through open and honest communication and feedback (Highhouse, 2002).
At the same time that scholars and practitioners were producing seminal work on group dynamics at the RCGD and NTL, Lewin’s theories and research were also strongly influencing group scholar practitioners at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. The Tavistock Institute brought together psychoanalysts and social scientists to apply psychoanalytical and open systems concepts to groups and organizations (Fraher, 2004; Geller, 2005). Under the auspices of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the institute spun off from the Tavistock Clinic, a mental health clinic providing treatment to patients and families affected by World War I, particularly returning soldiers suffering from shell shock. The institute was charged with addressing wider societal issues than solely mental health, including “the study of human relations in conditions of well-being, conflict and change, in the community, the work group, and the larger organization, and the promotion of the effectiveness of individuals and organizations” (Neumann, 2005, p. 120). Like Lewin and his team at RCGD, scholar-practitioners at the Tavistock Institute were concerned with social action for social change through action research. Social scientists at the institute developed an approach to understanding and improving organizational processes; they stressed the interconnectedness of psychological, technical, economic, and other needs for work, role, and task flow in organizational systems, which they named sociotechnical systems. A fundamental part of their studies was an experiential, living laboratory, called a group relations conference, where participants examined their lived experience of small, large, intergroup, and organizational dynamics with the goal of learning about social systems as these dynamics unfolded (Rice, 1965).
These ideas were reminiscent of Lewin’s field theory, and, indeed, Neumann (2005) noted that Kurt Lewin was a “shadow founder” of the institute (p. 119). Neumann continued, “For the first 25 years [of the institute’s life], scientific staff explicitly experimented with and applied Lewinian ideas. In the subsequent two decades, approaches from the earlier period became institutionalised into a house style” (p. 120). Shortly before Lewin’s untimely death in 1947, the founders of the Tavistock Institute invited him into a publishing partnership between Tavistock and RCGD to establish the journal Human Relations , an invitation Lewin accepted (Neumann, 2005). The first eight volumes of the journal published work from researchers associated with both institutions, demonstrating their continued collaboration even after Lewin’s death. In 1951, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues awarded the Tavistock Institute the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award for recognition of its practical theories of sociotechnical systems and group relations.
Continuing the Lewinian influence, group relations is the interplay of psychodynamic and open systems theories to understand group and organizational dynamics. The open systems aspect of group relations concerns Lewin’s work on the significant impact of environmental context on a person’s behavior. Open systems include the approach that organizational subsystems are all related to each other and any change in one part of the organization will affect change in the other subsystems. Thus, there is an input-throughput-output model implicit in the group relations framework (Agazarian, 2005; Miller and Rice, 1967). The environment provides the input, the organization creates the throughput, and then it delivers work as the output back to the environment. One affects the other continuously, and boundary permeability, or lack thereof, across sectors and subsectors is constantly assessed (Agazarian, 2005; Miller and Rice, 1967).
The psychodynamic contribution of group relations centers on the work of Bion (1961), who wrote about the presence of both conscious and unconscious processes in group life. Bion (1961) asserted that groups always have two primary aspects operating simultaneously: the “work group” (p. 143), consisting of overt, conscious, known group processes, and the “basic assumption group” (p. 146), consisting of covert, unconscious, sometimes irrational ones. Indeed, one of the tasks of attempting to resolve conflict in a group or team is to make the covert overt.
In addition, the Freudian concepts of defense mechanisms, unconscious strategies used to cope with anxiety (Freud, 1966), are also incorporated in group relations thinking (Menzies, 1959). Group relations theorists posit that groups engage most commonly in the defense mechanisms of splitting and projective identification when faced with extreme anxiety (Horowitz, 1985, Wells, 1995). Splitting is categorizing people, groups, or systems as all good or all bad. The defining quality of splitting is that opposite qualities cannot be contained in the same entity. Young children do this naturally (e.g., Mommy is all good; Daddy is all bad) before they have the psychological maturity to understand that Mommy can be both good and bad, as can Daddy. In groups, members may seek to portray one member as all bad (a scapegoat) while the rest of the group remains all good (martyrs), or the human resource department may be seen as all good (helpful, dedicated to people) while the finance department is characterized as all bad (greedy, bean counters). Groups may engage in splitting when faced with significant anxiety (e.g., when tasks are extremely ambiguous, budgets are cut, work is high profile, leadership is incompetent or absent) so as to make a situation seem more manageable. For example, it may be easier for team members to characterize a team leader as inarguably incompetent rather than confront the fact that the team members may not have the talent or resources to produce the required deliverables.
Similarly, groups that are under significant stress may engage in the defense mechanism of projective identification, whereby group members seek to disown undesirable characteristics in themselves and project them onto another, who then enacts them on their behalf. This protects the group from having to experience intensely uncomfortable feelings while allowing their expression through the member who “carries” the projections. Thus, the “bad” member of the group (unconsciously) enacts members’ incompetence, laziness, or other unwanted characteristics so as to free the other group members from having to own such undesirable qualities. Members then encourage the bad member’s badness (unconsciously) in order to identify with it, that is, to see their own feelings expressed. This defense mechanism protects group members from having to acknowledge their own painful, undesirable, unwanted qualities. Psychodynamic theorists typically position defense mechanisms as individual dynamics, that is, strategies that individuals use to cope with intrapsychic conflict. Yet group relations theorists believe they are applicable to group and organizational contexts (e.g., projective identification is, from a group relations perspective, the foundation of scapegoating in groups; see Gemmil, 1989). Relatedly, Sandy, Boardman, and Deutsch in chapter 17 in this Handbook discuss how defense mechanisms may be useful constructs in understanding not just intrapersonal conflicts but interpersonal and other external conflicts as well.
The group relations perspective offers a way to understand conflict in groups both systemically as well as in its discrete, specific parts (Lazar, 2004). Conflict in groups is frequently beneficial, as when it helps group members identify constructive, cooperative problem-solving strategies (see chapter 1 of this Handbook) or when it helps the group forge its identity, clarify goals, or develop better decision-making processes (Wheelan, 2013). Wheelan (2013) even asserts that high-performing teams have frequent conflict. These conflicts are typically brief, however, because these teams have effective strategies for managing conflict and engage in more cooperative processes than competitive ones in conflict resolution (see chapter 1 of this Handbook).
The group relations approach to understanding conflict affords one multiple units of analysis and, as a result, numerous options in working toward productive conflict resolution in groups. The group relations perspective has been applied to a wide variety of organizational systems in organization development work, including urban school reform (Pruitt and Barber, 2004), an AIDS therapy group (Brazaitis and Gushue, 2004), a pediatric oncology nursing service (Fruge and Adams, 2004), Dalit empowerment in India (Viswanath, 2009), and a national financial institution in South Africa (de Jager and Sher, 2009), among others. The psychodynamic aspects of the group relations perspective include an examination of the unconscious and covert processes of group life. This affords a deeper understanding of the conflict dynamics in groups as well as more options for conflict resolution (see chapter 17 in this Handbook for an in-depth discussion of psychodynamic theory and conflict). The open systems tenets of group relations include using a levels approach to understand group dynamics and conflict and incorporating the impact of the environmental context as a vital source of information about the conflict’s root causes and possibilities for intervention.
Wells (1995) described five levels of organizational analysis used to understand dynamics in groups and systems from a group relations perspective. This levels approach is a taxonomy for diagnosing group dynamics and conflict, as well as a blueprint to craft appropriate interventions. Wells’s framework is also called a group-as-a-whole or group-centered model, in that one of its central premises is that a group is more than the sum of its disparate parts. Again, this builds directly on the work of Lewin (1951), who, with a background in Gestalt psychology, also purported in his work that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. According to Wells and other group relations theorists (see Agazarian, 2005; Ettin, 2004), a group is not just a collection of individuals but an amalgam of those individuals. This means that the group’s essence or, as Wells puts it, the group’s “élan vital” (1995, p. 55), includes something different from but related to each individual’s contribution. Each group has its own personality or essence that is related to its particular members but is not equal to each discrete individual contribution. Using Wells’s group-as-a-whole framework, one might understand conflict in a group in related but different ways depending on which level of organizational analysis was being applied. The framework is described in detail below with an illustrative case example of how it can be used to understand group dynamics and conflict resolution.
The first level in Wells’s model is intrapersonal . Understanding conflict at the intrapersonal level of organizational analysis means thinking about how one’s individual personality, internal traits, or state of mind is related to the conflict. An individual’s actions are said to be diagnostic of the actor at this level of analysis. So someone who explodes in a rage at a business meeting might be said to have an explosive personality, an anger management problem, or perhaps to be underrested and overcaffeinated. Either a trait (enduring personality characteristic) or a state (temporary condition) explanation is a potentially valid hypothesis at the intrapersonal level of analysis.
The second level in the model is the interpersonal level. At this level, dynamics are understood by looking at member-to-member relations, often in a dyad. If two people have a significant conflict at a meeting, the interpersonal level of analysis means that we understand the conflict as residing primarily between the two of them. The conflict is understood as about the dyad rather than due to either one’s personality alone or as part of a larger group dynamic.
The third level is the group-as-a-whole or group-centered level. At this third level of analysis in Wells’s taxonomy, a group member who erupts in anger would be said to be expressing that anger on behalf of the group. That is, others in the group likely also feel angry yet deny those undesirable feelings in themselves, project them onto another member, and then subtly, unconsciously, encourage that member to express them on their behalf.
The fourth level in the model is the intergroup level. This level concerns individuals engaging in behaviors as representations of their respective group membership. Therefore, a conflict that occurs between two individuals could be understood at the intergroup level of analysis as being between their respective groups through their group membership. Thus, a human resources executive in conflict with a finance executive in an organization could be understood as a conflict between the HR and finance departments being expressed by these two individuals but existing between the two departments or subgroups.
Finally, the fifth level of Wells’s taxonomy is the interorganizationa l level. Diagnosing and understanding conflict at this level means looking at the conflict as a representation of the organization’s relationship to another organization or organizations, as well as the organization’s relationship to its environment. Employees of two organizations undergoing a merger and acquisition may engage in conflict that is less about the individual employees and more about the relationship between the acquiring organization and the acquired one. That is, the conflict may represent power dynamics between the organizations such as turf wars or struggles around redundancies rather than real animosity between the employees from each organization.
The five levels of organizational analysis framework can be applied to a group or team experiencing conflict as a means to diagnose the various sources of that conflict. The BART framework—boundary, authority, role, and task—can then be used across Wells’s five levels to develop strategies to improve group, team, and organizational performance, including conflict resolution.
The BART system is a set of social-structural concepts for intervening in groups, teams, and organizations and can be used to address conflict (Green and Molenkamp, 2005; Hayden and Molenkamp, 2004). BART helps group members consider emotional and other potentially covert factors, including projective processes that may affect their ability to engage in constructive conflict (Noumair, in press). Focusing on the concepts of boundary, authority, role, and task in conflict resolution is consistent with recent empirical research findings on group conflict in organizations that identify task conflict, relationship conflict, and process conflict as the essential areas of study and intervention (Tindale et al., 2005). In addition, BART can be mapped across Wells’s five levels of analysis as a means of conflict resolution in groups. Each component of BART is explained below:
Following is a case study of a group experiencing conflict, The Case of Pink Power. Group members at the Pink Power organization are wrestling with weighty issues, including diversity, access to resources, succession, and the organization’s future among others. There is nothing inherently wrong with the tensions they are experiencing; in fact, they are asking important, even profound, questions of each other. Yet they cannot make use of their differences of opinion to engage in problem solving around the organization’s critical issues. On the contrary, they degenerate into mistrusting one another and each other’s work. Some of the group’s problematic dynamics are described in the case study, and Wells’s taxonomy is applied to the case such that the group’s dynamics are categorized at each level of analysis. The BART model is then applied to the case as a group relations conflict resolution framework that can be used to help the group engage their conflicts more constructively.
Pink Power is a nonprofit educational and philanthropic organization that includes in its mission the goals of educating women and their families about breast cancer and its treatment, helping women advocate for themselves as they navigate the medical world of diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer, and providing one-time funds to women in need as a way to ease the economic stress that inhibits recovery and quality of life for those with breast cancer. The organization’s senior leadership team had been struggling with entrenched conflicts about diversity for nearly a year.
Pink Power’s senior leadership team is made up of mostly white women (five out of nine), including the executive director, Diana, who is also the organization’s founder and a breast cancer survivor herself. On the team are one African American man, one African American woman, one Asian American woman, and one white man. The African American man, Leon, serves in the newly created role of director of diversity for the team. He had formerly been a part of the development function and was a very successful fundraiser. The African American woman, Nina, is the HR director; the Asian American woman, Angela, is the head of information technology; and the white man, David, is the medical director and an oncologist. The other white women’s roles are research director, Karen; education director, Emily; development and finance director, Alice; and program director, Pam.
Over the past year, the organization has been trying to work more closely with communities of color, particularly the African American community, as rates of female breast cancer are disproportionately high among African American women and the community is seen as underserved in terms of education and support from the medical establishment. Furthermore, two years ago, there was an article in the local newspaper about Pink Power where an African American woman said she did not feel welcome as a client at the organization. Although the quote was only a small part of the article, it was taken up heatedly in the blogosphere for several days afterward and reverberated negatively throughout the organization and its board for months. Diana and the board discussed improving Pink Power’s efforts to reach out to communities of color as both donors and clients. Pink Power’s board is very supportive of Diana as executive director and is in agreement that the organization should include new communities in its strategic plan.
One specific point of contention on Diana’s senior leadership team is that it did not unanimously agree on the creation of Leon’s position of director of diversity. Many felt that all members of the team “did diversity” and so did not think it necessary to add another director-level position. Yet Diana was swayed by Leon’s argument that he was already being pulled into that role anyway, as he was the “go-to-guy” whenever diversity issues came up in the organization. Several team members were quite critical of Leon, stating he was “narcissistic,” “slick,” and “pushing his own race agenda.” Diana acknowledged that Leon was a lightning rod on the team, noting that he was not liked or trusted by some team members, but she liked him and appreciated his skill and expertise.
Since taking up his new role eighteen months ago, Leon worked with Alice and Pam to sponsor “affinity events” where African American women with breast cancer came together for information, support, and guidance in completing applications for Pink Power’s Stress Relief Fund. Affinity events are typically for one particular social identity group only (e.g., African American women); those of other social identities (e.g., white women) are not included. A few of the white women on the team were outspokenly against this. Several o were openly hostile to Leon about his initiatives, noting that Pink Power was renowned for its inclusiveness; they thought starting affinity groups and events would splinter the group irreparably. A number of the white women repeatedly stated that Pink Power already had a diversity group, Pink Rainbow, which was headed by a major donor to the organization and staffed by breast cancer survivors and other donors, staff, and volunteers. It is a diverse group in terms of members’ racial and cultural backgrounds. Pink Rainbow organized various diversity events to bring the work of Pink Power to diverse constituencies. Diana was supportive of the separate affinity events and thought they could coexist along with Pink Rainbow. She stated this publicly several times, but the bitter fight over Pink Rainbow versus affinity events continued on her team
Angela noted that she comes from a family of immigrants and that she worked hard to get where she is. She thinks other people of color should do the same rather than benefit from special events or resources that others do not get. Alice said that as a Jewish American woman, she feels the same way. David is quietly supportive of the diversity efforts at Pink Power, including Leon and his work. Emily and Pam are new to the team. Each said she feels she has walked in on a conversation about diversity that started a long time ago, so it is difficult to get her bearings. Emily said she was confused by the concern about affinity events as they were conducted often at her last job (a similar one) with good results. Pam does not have much experience with affinity events but thinks they are a good idea for reaching new markets and new constituencies. She said that although she agrees with Leon, she finds it difficult to support him openly because he is seen as such a polarizing figure on the team.
Indeed, several of the white women who had been at Pink Power for a long time said Leon was untrustworthy and accused him of jockeying for his next career move rather than focusing on what Pink Power really needed. Alice, in particular, was often at odds with Leon. The two seemed to strongly dislike each other, each criticizing the other frequently behind closed doors (albeit rarely directly). Several younger team members said they thought Alice was old-fashioned, and some even said they feared she wanted Pink Power to remain an organization that served white women only. Alice was brilliant at her job, however; her team routinely exceeded their quarterly fundraising goals. Several on the senior leadership team mentioned they thought it was difficult for Diana to give Alice frank feedback because the board loved Alice (and the money she brought in to the organization). Nina has a long history of doing diversity work in conjunction with HR in other jobs. She would like to put together some staff development workshops on diversity, racism, and white privilege for this team, but fears such trainings would be poorly received. Recently Nina overheard Alice say to Angela, “The last thing we need to spend our time on right now is white privilege!” Nina noted that the team is not going to get very far with its diversity efforts in the community until “we do our own work on diversity around the table.”
Wells’s five levels of organizational analysis (1995) can be applied to the senior leadership team of the Pink Power organization in order to understand some of the team’s destructive conflicts surrounding diversity and how to resolve them. The BART system can then be used across Wells’s five levels to formulate specific conflict resolution strategies for this team.
When we use the first level of Wells’s model, the intrapersonal level of analysis, Leon is a source of this team’s conflict. His colleagues describe him negatively, and others on the team blame him as the major cause of much of the team’s struggle regarding how to approach diversity in the organization. For some, he is the cause of the conflict, and indeed, Leon is part of this team’s conflict. He has an intense personality that some experience as disingenuous and manipulative. It should be noted that others experience him as charming, compelling, and skilled. (More on this point later.) Leon is surely a provocative team member, due in part to who he is and how he takes up his work role. Yet given that others on the team also praise him, he is not the sole source of the conflict (as many of his colleagues believe). Removing Leon from the team would not make the conflict about diversity disappear. Therefore, it is helpful to examine other sources of the conflict at the other levels of analysis.
Diana and several team members describe ongoing conflict between Leon and Alice. The two of them often heatedly argue in staff meetings, they do not support each other’s work, and they speak disparagingly of each other privately. Alice criticizes Leon’s diversity programs saying they are divisive and exclusionary, and she says that Leon loves “to play the race card.” Leon says Alice is a dinosaur when it comes to understanding diversity in organizations in the twenty-first century; he calls her ignorant and unskilled. The pair has a long history of dislike and distrust.
Looking at the conflict in this team at the interpersonal level of analysis, one might conclude that Leon and Alice are the problem. They are two of the primary drivers of the destructive conflict because they refuse to work out their differences and will not collaborate in a constructive manner as team members. Indeed, in working with Leon and Alice, it is easy to see how they might dislike each other. They are very different in temperament. Leon is extroverted and speaks his mind freely and often. He is well versed in the latest trends in popular culture, loves to salsa dance, and sees blockbuster movies the day they open. Alice is introverted and measured when she speaks, dresses in modest, conservative clothing, and prefers quiet evenings at home to being in crowds at film openings.
Leon and Alice also differ across a number of identity variables, including age, race, gender, political affiliation, religion, and socioeconomic status. It is not shocking that they would have conflicts. Yet some members of the team largely agree with Leon’s arguments, while others agree with Alice. The team members informally take sides and argue vehemently in defense of Leon or Alice. Therefore, while the conflict surely is in part between Leon and Alice, it is not solely between them but is also present in the larger group. Were it not, other group members would not so easily be able to identify with one or the other of them, nor would they be able to articulate their own position so strenuously in favor of one or the other. In fact, the other group members may be invested in positioning the conflict as only about Leon or located solely between Leon and Alice so as not to have to acknowledge their own role in it. That is, it serves the others on the team, albeit likely unconsciously, to insist the conflict is only intrapersonal or interpersonal instead of belonging to all of them.
Understanding the conflict at the group-as-a-whole level of analysis means considering that the conflict exists in the entire senior leadership team at Pink Power and that Leon and Alice are both enacting destructive aspects of the conflict on behalf of the group as a whole. Both can be seen as potential scapegoats who are asked (unconsciously) to carry the team’s conflict so that other members do not have to. According to Wells (1995), Gemmil (1989), Horowitz (1985), and other group relations theorists (e.g., Taylor, Kurlioff, and Smith, 2004), group members are put forth (unconsciously) to represent unwanted aspects of group life, in particular, when there is significant anxiety present in the group. Some group members then become “serviceable others” (Morrison, 1992) to contain noxious, painful, or frightening feelings so that others in the group are freed from them. The extreme example of this is scapegoating. A scapegoat represents the badness (errors, failure) in a group and she or he is often sent away (isolated, fired) even though all members of the group are responsible for the group’s badness. Yet the scapegoat is made to carry the badness on behalf of the other group members.
The Pink Power organization has not recovered from the newspaper article and subsequent social media attention suggesting it was unwelcoming to African American women. This event was discussed frequently at various levels of the organization, yet no clear strategic plan of how to address it was put forward. This caused significant anxiety in the group, and the senior leadership team was still reeling from this incident and its implications. The fear that Pink Power was perceived as a racist organization or even that it actually was one was never said explicitly, yet it remained an unspoken concern at team meetings when the topic was discussed.
Examining the team’s conflict from the group-as-a-whole level of analysis means understanding Leon’s behavior and Leon and Alice’s interactions as a manifestation of the group’s conflict. This team was exceedingly anxious about how it “did diversity.” Leon was outspoken about the need to make changes in the organization in order to effectively engage the African American community. His communication style was commanding, and he exuded confidence about his ideas and beliefs. Indeed, at times, Leon seemed to suggest he was the only one who was skilled at diversity work in the entire organization. Other team members complained bitterly about Leon and his “race agenda.” He came to represent and voice the (feared) failure of the organization to be truly inclusive. Rather than using this conflict as an opportunity for the group to examine their own team’s diversity and its relationship to their organization’s perhaps outdated practices regarding diversity, the group members engaged in destructive conflict. Members disowned their own beliefs that Pink Power was potentially racist and asked Leon to carry them unknowingly on their behalf. They then hated him for it. So Leon was indeed a lightning rod, but he was also a talented fundraiser and a valued colleague. Clients adored him, and several of his colleagues on the leadership team said how lucky they were to have him as part of their staff given his expertise in both fundraising and diversity.
Alice was also scapegoated. She was portrayed as a “dinosaur,” a living representation of the organization’s worst fears about what it had become: old, outdated, and out of touch. Some on the team said Alice needed to be fired given her inability to embrace new ideas about diversity, multiculturalism, and what inclusiveness means today. Yet Alice also received high praise from some in the organization. They noted she was warm, caring, and skilled as a fundraiser, and they felt she always put the clients first. Alice had been one of the first employees of the organization and was treasured by some as a member of the old guard and a living symbol of the organization’s history and tradition.
This feedback about Leon and Alice suggests that neither he nor she is solely “the problem.” Rather they both have strengths and weaknesses like all other members of the team. Leon had been cast as “the problem” in this conflict, as had Alice to a lesser extent, when actually all members of the team were a part of it. Leon and Alice represented conflicts in the group that were covert, and helping the team members make these conflicts overt would enable them to see there are group root causes, not solely individual or interpersonal ones.
Surfacing these conflicts at the group-as-a-whole level might be a difficult process for this team, although one that could potentially truly unstick them from their entrenchment. That is, helping the group examine their conflicts at the group level might enable them to work toward collaborative solutions. The group-as-a-whole framework includes the idea that group members are put forth to carry or represent unwanted or undesirable feelings or qualities that others want to disown. Therefore, scapegoating Leon, Alice, or the two of them as a pair served a purpose for the other team members, although they might not be fully aware of it. At the group-as-a-whole level of analysis, Leon contains all the self-interest on behalf of the group. That is, he is seen as pushing his own agenda so that others are seen as not self-interested but only as advocates for the good of the group. Alice is cast as the dinosaur so the others on the team are free to be young and cutting edge. By not addressing the group issues, the team members leave them stuck in Leon, Alice, and in Leon and Alice’s pair.
Leon and Alice’s interactions can be understood at the intergroup level of analysis as a representation of a conflict not just between the two of them (interpersonal level), but also between their respective informal subgroups. Their conflict can be seen as between the new guard of younger staff recently hired by the organization whose understanding of multiculturalism and diversity is very different from that of the old guard, the veteran advocates who started the organization in the 1980s after working actively in the feminist movement over the previous decade. It is a conflict about who owns the organization and who gets to decide its constituencies: the old or the new. The old felt pushed out of the conversation on diversity at times, while the new felt the old was unskilled in multiculturalism. The new failed to take into account the critical importance of the organization’s history and traditions as inclusive and egalitarian and instead wanted to jump to new ways of working with diversity without acknowledging or accounting for the organizational culture around such issues. The old failed to consider that what diversity and inclusiveness mean now may be different from what it meant in the 1980s.
This generational conflict then was not only about age differences, but also about the organization’s future and mortality. This vantage point sheds more light on why the conflict about affinity events was so entrenched. The conflict was not just about whether the organization should hold affinity events. Were that the case, it would likely have been resolved more expediently. Rather, when viewed at the intergroup level, affinity events represented a conflict about the organization’s future. These events stirred up questions about leadership succession and symbolized a concern about the organization’s mortality and sustainability. Would Pink Power be able to adapt with the times in order to thrive in its current environment? To do so, did Pink Power have to disempower, silence, or eliminate the old guard? The conflict between Leon and Alice was between them certainly, but it was also representative of deeper, painful, critical conflicts between subgroups in the larger senior leadership team.
Finally, the team’s conflicts could be seen as a manifestation of larger organizational issues. Examining the conflict from Wells’s fifth level of analysis means looking at how this team’s infighting about diversity at their organization reflects larger issues in the breast cancer advocacy community regarding these same topics.
Broadly speaking, breast cancer advocacy organizations want to be seen as inclusive of all women (and sometimes men), and that means having a community of staff and clients reflecting the demographics of who gets breast cancer. It also means having policies that promote diversity and inclusion, as well as an organizational climate that does the same. Yet how to do this exactly is not always clear and is often challenging. The interorganizational level of analysis focuses on how the conflict in the group is related to these larger systemic issues. Therefore, it is not just about Leon, or Leon and Alice, or the senior leadership team, or the older and younger generations, but also the entire organization and how it is relating to its larger environmental context: the breast cancer advocacy organization community, the breast cancer research community, the US health care system, and so on. Recognizing these conflicts as opportunities for the organization to grow and change rather than as permanent fissures among group members could help shift the conflicts to being constructive rather than destructive.
Wells’s levels of organizational analysis provide a framework for understanding conflict in groups at multiple points of entry. Wells emphasized that in any group or system, there are dynamics that occur at each level continuously. That means there are rarely dynamics solely at the intrapersonal level or solely at the interpersonal level and so on. Rather, processes occur at each level at any given time. One may notice, attend to, or intervene at a select level or levels based on a variety of factors. The level where one intervenes in a group conflict is related to what one has been asked to do, who one has access to, as well as how sophisticated and capable an organization is to look at itself at multiple levels. Sometimes psychological sophistication is built into an organization’s culture whereby employees and team members are used to thinking about themselves critically and working on organization development from a systemic perspective. Other organizations have cultures that de-emphasize psychological inquiry and organization development and would be less capable at looking at group conflict across various levels of analysis, at least at the outset. It is sometimes possible to do a phased approach where one addresses the group’s presenting problem first and over time is allowed to work more deeply with the group on the more emotionally laden, values-based issues that reverberate systemically.
For example, in the case of Pink Power, a consultant might be hired to provide Leon with executive coaching to reduce his antagonizing behaviors (intrapersonal level), mediate the conflict between Leon and Alice (interpersonal level), conduct team building (group-as-a-whole level), or address diversity issues in the organization (intergroup or interorganizational). An executive coach who worked with Leon individually could (and should) address how the larger contextual issues have an impact on how he functions in the organization but would not necessarily be allowed to expand the scope of work to include working directly with the larger team or organization.
A mediator might work at the interpersonal level of analysis toward conflict resolution between Leon and Alice, getting them to agree to shared goals, ground rules for working together, and the like but might not have access to the larger team or organization.
At the group-as-a-whole level, a consultant might be hired to work with the senior leadership team on team building, as a way to address its conflict regarding diversity, but may not be given access to the board. And so on.
Ideally, a practitioner engaged in conflict resolution work in a group or team would have access to the entire organization or system and would use Wells’s taxonomy to diagnose the conflict of the group, team, or system at each level. This provides the most breadth and depth in offering strategies for conflict resolution. Yet when one is granted access to only one or two levels, it is still immensely helpful to frame the issues at the other levels to provide valuable organizational context for the conflict’s potential multiple root causes.
Wells’s five levels of organizational analysis applied to a group conflict allow a nuanced diagnosis of that conflict at every level of the system. This gives practitioners maximum information in understanding the conflict, as well as a maximum number of options in where and how to intervene toward conflict resolution. This approach provides multiple points of entry to help a group shift from destructive conflicts that paralyze to constructive conflicts that enable a group to more forward. The BART system—boundary, authority, role, and task—is a set of social-structural concepts for intervening in groups, teams, and organizations and can be used across Wells’s five levels. BART is a useful model for helping the Pink Power’s senior leadership team resolve their group conflict.
At the intrapersonal level of analysis in Pink Power, Leon would benefit from attending to authority and role. His role of director of diversity was ambivalently authorized. Several on the team did not approve of its creation. Diana had said repeatedly she supports Leon’s role and Leon himself, yet Leon noted he feels unsupported by Diana. Part of the problem is that Diana does not clearly, forcefully, and publicly state that the diversity work that Leon is doing for Pink Power is integral to the entire organization; as a result, Leon’s work and his role are underauthorized. Instead, affinity events are perceived as Leon’s pet project and an outgrowth of his own career goals rather than role-appropriate work that is vital to the organization’s growth into new communities. Diana needs to acknowledge to Leon and the rest of her team that the diversity director role is essential and that affinity events are a key part of the organization’s efforts to serve new communities in breast cancer advocacy. Framing some of these conflicts for Leon (and the entire senior leadership team) as about role and authority enables the team members to engage in concrete strategies for resolution rather than staying stuck in a fight about Leon’s personality.
At the interpersonal level of analysis, Leon and Alice need to work on role and task. Both care deeply about the organization and have shared goals to help the organization grow and thrive. Thus, they have shared tasks broadly speaking: promoting the organization and securing its successful future. In addition, both are skilled fundraisers, so they share a common strength. Leon and Alice would be helped to see how their work roles complement rather than contradict each other. Although they may not be best friends, each has areas of expertise the other could appreciate: Leon in strategies in diversity and Alice in history and tradition. Both areas are needed to help Pink Power continue to be successful. Reorienting Leon and Alice away from the idea that they can never get along and toward the idea that they can work well together in role on shared tasks would be a useful strategy for ameliorating the conflict between them.
At the group-as-a-whole level of analysis, the entire team needs to work on task, role, and authority. The senior leadership team is having significant conflicts over diversity in the organization, yet working with diversity (their own and that of their clients) is an essential part of their organizational work. Diana sees it as key to their organization’s continued growth, and her board concurs. The senior leadership team needs help understanding how diversity tasks are aligned with the organization’s mission and its strategic plan. Clarity around these tasks also means authorizing diversity work. The senior leadership team is refusing to authorize affinity events as if they are not a part of their organizational work. If the team can agree to rethink how they do diversity as a way to improve their effectiveness, they would likely be able to authorize affinity events as a valuable offering. Finally, at the group-as-a-whole level, the team has difficulty addressing conflict openly. Leon is being scapegoated as “the problem” when the difficulties around diversity lie within the entire team. There is a lack of role clarity and a lack of authorization concerning Leon’s role. The team unknowingly has an investment in keeping Leon’s role and authority ambiguous because this maintains him as the problem and protects them from having to take responsibility for the conflict as a group issue. Similarly, the team has allowed Leon and Alice to enact the conflict as if it were solely between their dyad rather than present in the entire team.
At the intergroup level of analysis, the various subgroups on the senior leadership team need to address boundaries, task, and authority. The organizational tasks require them to work across generational boundaries to collaborate to get work done. The tasks require them to authorize both the young and the senior, the new and old. They need to stop splitting into subgroups that keep them isolated and in opposing camps, and instead collaborate across generational and belief boundaries. They would do well to form a subcommittee with multiple members of both generational groups to work explicitly on addressing diversity both within and outside the organization. Knowing that their conflicts about diversity are related to generational struggles and the future of the organization and that they need each other in order to move forward would likely help them collaborate more and fight less. That is, they would have new awareness of what the critical issues are rather than staying stuck in a conflict about affinity events. They then could directly address strategic planning for Pink Power’s future sustainability that incorporates tradition yet embraces new ideas and strategies concerning diversity.
At the organizational level of analysis, the team needs to work on boundaries, specifically, increasing its boundary permeability with the external environment. If the organization’s recent negative press is to be believed, Pink Power is in danger of being too insular and ignoring the very communities it should be targeting (e.g., African American women). It could amplify its community engagement and make it visible and meaningful. Those at Pink Power could go on a public relations campaign to highlight their accomplishments and the ways in which they do work for a broad cross section of women. They could form strategic partnerships with organizations that work directly with African American women with breast cancer. They could build a strategic plan incorporating this type of community outreach as an essential goal.
This chapter has presented a group relations taxonomy for understanding conflict in groups: Wells’s (1995) five levels of organizational analysis. The group relations perspective incorporates psychodynamic and systems thinking, and Wells’s model provides a means to understand group conflict at various levels across an organizational system (intrapersonal, interpersonal, group-as-a-whole, intergroup, and interorganizational) that includes group members’ unconscious behaviors that promote destructive group conflict and keep it entrenched. In addition, this chapter offered a group relations framework for conflict resolution, BART (boundary, authority, role, and task), which can be applied across Wells’s five levels to offer groups specific strategies for making group conflict constructive rather than destructive.
The field of group relations and the use of its perspectives to understand and improve group and organizational life remain strong nearly seventy years after its birth in England just after World War II. Dozens of group relations professional organizations around the world and organization development consultants engage in conflict resolution work from a group relations perspective internationally in settings as diverse as small community mental health centers to large multinational corporations. A group relations perspective offers an unparalleled richness in understanding group life in that it examines all levels of the organizational system in which the group lives, as well as helps to uncover and explain group members’ unconscious motives, behaviors, and feelings (as well as their conscious ones) to free a group from entrenched conflicts. More applied research on the use of these models in organizations will help refine and hone what works and what does not across what organizational contexts and will add to our understanding of group dynamics and conflict resolution. We surely need to understand more about how to hang together so we do not hang separately.
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