A tense meeting.
Two people who “don’t get along.”
A workshop to “reset relationships” and get everyone “back on the same page.”
The implicit promise is simple: deal with the difficult moment, and the team will get back to ‘normal’.
But what actually happens in teams is not a string of one-off incidents; these are an expression of an ongoing pattern. The same tensions keep reappearing, just attached to different issues. The same people speak first, and the same people hold back. Certain topics reliably drain the energy from the room. Those acute moments don’t create the patterns. They are the patterns.
Group dynamics don’t just explain these temporary disturbances in an otherwise stable system –
they are how the system works.
What we are really naming when we talk about “group dynamics”.
It helps to separate three intertwined ideas.
- Group process is the visible flow of interaction over time: who talks, who is silent, how decisions move or stall.
- Group dynamics are the emotional, symbolic and power-laden patterns that shape that flow: who gets idealised or scapegoated, where the group directs dependency, what it habitually avoids.
- Team dynamics are those same phenomena, but inside organisational teams that live with hierarchy, targets, history and very uneven stakes.
Wilfred Bion’s work with wartime therapy groups remains one of the sharpest accounts of how these dynamics actually operate. He observed two main ways groups can function: the work group, which is the conscious, rational side where members cooperate as individuals to focus on the shared task; and the basic-assumption group, which is largely unconscious and kicks in when anxiety builds, pulling the team into irrational patterns that feel essential for survival – but which derail the work.
These are not entirely separate; Bion saw them as always co-existing, with one dominating at any moment (or even both operating simultaneously, with basic assumptions subtly undermining the work group).
In a basic-assumption group, it seems as if the team’s real focus is something else entirely. In dependency, everyone waits for a strong leader to fix things (total deference to the CEO, for example). In fight/flight, the group unites against a common enemy or flees discomfort (blaming another department, or avoiding tough calls). In pairing, hope gets pinned on a magical future solution that will somehow save the day (like waiting for the “perfect hire” or next big project). The team might be discussing strategy or KPIs, but underneath, it is managing fear by pinning their hopes on a heroic leader, scapegoating someone, or chasing false harmony.
In other words, agenda is one thing, the dynamics are another thing entirely.
S.H. Foulkes pushed this further with his notion of the group matrix – the shared communicational “field” within which each person’s experience is continuously shaped by everyone else. From this perspective, a team is not a container for individual psychologies. It is an emergent pattern of relationships, expectations and implicit rules. A shift in seating, a joke at someone’s expense, an eye-roll when finance speaks: these are not trivialities. They are small edits to the matrix.
Psychology and complexity science have begun to catch up with what clinicians like Bion and Foulkes saw in the room. Research on small-groups shows that groups naturally settle into semi-stable patterns of interaction – like familiar ways of talking, deciding or deferring – that persist for a while but can shift or collapse under pressure. These are called “attractor states,” because the group keeps drifting back to them even as tasks or people change.
Dynamical-systems research on teams takes a similar view: it treats teams like physical systems that evolve over time through coordinated actions and feedback loops, showing how teams shift between distinct patterns (tight hierarchy versus open brainstorming) when hit by pressure, ambiguity or conflict – much like water changing from liquid to ice under certain conditions.
Group dynamics are not random noise. They are patterned, and they are responsive to context.
The problem these ideas were trying to solve.
Mainstream management theory has often assumed that if you get the structure and incentives right, human behaviour will fall into line. People are treated as rational actors who apply tools, frameworks and mindsets to a world “out there.” When groups behave ineffectively – avoid hard topics, attack dissenters, cling to outdated plans – this is framed as a failure of individual competence or motivation.
Bion and Foulkes were facing something that this rationalist view could not explain: groups that regressed, colluded and froze in ways no amount of exhortation or “clarity of purpose” could shift. The point of theorising group dynamics was not to add another label to awkward meetings. It was to acknowledge that
anxiety, fantasy and power are not bugs in group life.
They are the water in which teams swim – day in, day out.
Might be strange to consider, but it’s where collective work takes place.
Complexity theorists such as Ilya Prigogine mount a parallel challenge from another direction. His work on nonequilibrium thermodynamics shows that, far from equilibrium, systems do not simply return to a prior state. They selforganise into new patterns, irreversibly, as they exchange energy with their environment. Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles take that insight into organisational life, arguing that organisations are not systems to be designed at a distance but ongoing complex responsive processes of relating. Strategy, culture and “team health” are not objects. They are patterns in the conversation.
Seen this way, group and team dynamics are simply how those complex processes become visible at human scale. They are not the soft backdrop to the “hard” business of decision-making. They are how the decisions get made.
Chris Maxwell’s doctoral research on leadership teams makes this uncomfortably concrete. Putting intact executive teams through experimental simulations, he showed that genuinely complex challenges trigger teams into highly charged, metastable states – what he calls complex dissipative teams. In these states, teams can do their best thinking, but the experience is demanding: uncertainty rises, roles blur, conflict surfaces. Unsurprisingly, most teams try to damp this down and slide back to equilibrium by simplifying the problem, reverting to hierarchy, cracking a joke, or rushing to a shallow consensus. The dynamics are a way of managing anxiety, but the “price” is often poorer strategic judgment.
The question, then, is not whether your team has dynamics. It is whether you are prepared to notice how those dynamics might be helping you avoid what is most at stake.
So what? How does any of this help teams work better?
There is a risk here of simply replacing one set of buzzwords with another. “Basic assumptions,” “attractors,” “dissipative structures” – these can become the next vocabulary to deploy without changing practice. A useful test is whether a concept makes more of the team’s actual life discussable, or less.
Three payoffs stand out when teams are more conscious of group process and dynamics.
- First, anxiety becomes interpretable, not just contagious. When a senior leader makes a provocative move and the room falls silent, the usual move is either to smooth it over or to double down on control. A Bionian lens asks instead: what assumption has just taken hold here? Have we collectively shifted into dependency, waiting for the CEO to rescue us? Into fight/flight, scanning for an enemy or escape route? Naming that shift does not magically fix it, but it creates the possibility of choice.
- Second, teams can work with emergence instead of pretending to be in control. Complexity perspectives emphasise that in genuinely uncertain environments, you cannot specify outcomes in advance; what you can shape are the interaction patterns through which people make sense together. Gorman and colleagues’ work on teams as dynamical systems shows that changing who coordinates with whom, and when, can alter the team’s attractor landscape – its repertoire of typical states. Rather than asking, “How do we keep this team in a permanently highperforming state?” the more realistic question is, “Which recurrent states do we recognise, and how do we move between them deliberately?”
- Third, it grounds “soft skills” in something more than preference. Applied research on small groups suggests that behaviour change in groups arises from interacting processes: norms, identity, emotional safety, power dynamics, and explicit design choices such as size and composition. That is a long way from the idea that a quick offsite, a new meeting template or a team charter will transform a team. It invites teams to treat their own dynamics as a legitimate object of inquiry, not as an embarrassing side quest.
Every team brings its own dynamics.
This is where generic models start to creak. Stage theories of group development, or neat lists of “five dysfunctions,” offer tidy reassurance but little help when a particular team in a particular context keeps looping through the same unhelpful pattern. They flatten what is, in practice, always contextual, political and embodied.
From our perspective, the work is to start with this team’s dynamics in this organisation. That means:
- Attending to what actually happens under pressure, not to what people say happens on surveys.
- Tracing how history, hierarchy, identity and role expectations show up in the moment – who gets protected, who gets ‘thrown under the bus’, which topics reliably generate friction.
- Cocreating deliberate practices that fit the team’s context: structured pauses to ask “What are we doing to each other right now?”, routines for surfacing marginalised views, ways of working with bodily cues (tight jaws, restless feet) as data rather than noise.
Healthy team dynamics should not be assumed to be a permanent state of harmony. They enable the conditions to notice and stay with friction long enough that something genuinely new can emerge, rather than collapsing back into familiar avoidance.
This is demanding work.
It cuts against the appetite for silver bullets and the comforting story that better tools will let us out-think uncertainty. But the alternative is to let dynamics run the team from the shadows. If group dynamics are how your team actually makes sense, decides and defends itself, the real choice is simple: ignore them, and be governed by them; or embrace them, and make them part of your practice.
References
- Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. London, UK: Tavistock.
- Group Analytic Society International. (2016). The groupanalytic group matrix concept. Retrieved from https://groupanalyticsociety.co.uk/the-group-analytic-group-matrix-concept/
- Stacey, R. D. (2003). Complexity and group processes: A radically social understanding of individuals. London, UK: Routledge.
- Stacey, R. D., & Mowles, C. (2016). Strategic management and organisational dynamics (7th ed.). Harlow, UK: Pearson.
- Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1997). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. New York, NY: Free Press.
- Gorman, J. C., Dunbar, T. A., Grimm, D., & Gipson, C. L. (2017). Understanding and modeling teams as dynamical systems. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1053. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01053
- Lauro Grotto, R., Guazzini, A., & Bagnoli, F. (2014). Metastable structures and size effects in small group dynamics. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 699. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00699
- Maxwell, C. R. (2022). It’s just not that simple: A complex adaptive systems approach to understanding changing dynamics in leadership teams (Doctoral dissertation, University of Technology Sydney).
- Borek, A. J., & Abraham, C. (2018). How do small groups promote behaviour change? An integrative conceptual review of explanatory mechanisms. Applied Psychology: Health and WellBeing. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12120