Conflict between its men and women was the hallmark of a team I once worked with. The senior members were all women who were strong feminists. The men came from a community with traditional views on male/female roles. The men, despite their efforts to understand the women, constantly displayed their blind spots. The women felt frustrated and angry, and complained they had to continually educate the men. Each side saw the other as the problem.

A young manager took over a company whose performance had been mediocre. He introduced a series of systems, policies, and programs to improve productivity. His style was to figure out the best way of operating and then get people to adopt it. In his words, "I can't say that this was the wrong way - things did get changed. But I found myself becoming busier and busier answering questions and making suggestions....Every problem was my problem. The harder I worked, the more my managers came to me for advice." (Clinard, 1989)

Both these examples illustrate strong, recurring patterns in teams that drag down performance. In a highly functioning group, these underlying psychological dynamics are at a minimum. Its members are goal-oriented, work interdependently, and communicate well. However, if conditions are right, any team can be subject to issues that arise at an unconscious level, create anxiety, and interfere with work relationships.

One explanation for these phenomena was given by Wilfred Bion (1959) with the concept of basic assumption groups . The basic assumption (BA) group co-exists with the task-oriented work group, but emerges when the group faces a situation that provokes anxiety too great to face consciously. This unconscious response seems to carry an assumption that certain conditions apply, and members behave ‘as if' they do. The assumptions are throw-backs to primitive survival instincts. Of the three forms of basic assumptions that Bion described (dependency, fight/flight, and pairing), two relate to our examples. (For a fuller discussion of basic assumption groups and other destructive processes in groups see Defense Mechanisms in Teams )

BA Dependency is related to early childhood and the need to have someone look after us if we are to survive. The basic assumption is a kind of collective "I want my mama!" combined sometimes with an unspoken, passive rebellion. Members of the group behave as if they must have a leader to tell them what to do and show them how to do it if they are to manage. The leader frequently experiences all eyes turning to her when information is needed, decisions are to be made or action taken. If the leader takes over as the group seems to want, they may ignore her direction.

With BA Fight/Flight the team responds as if there is a threat to its survival that it must fight or run away from. The fight mode is characterized by uproar. Team members fight among themselves or attack the organization, the leader, or the task as it is laid out. In the flight mode, they may be distracted by side issues or are excessively absent or late. In either mode the group becomes engrossed in issues of varying degrees of relevance (parking spaces, who makes the coffee, lack of resources, or new work demands) and rides them like hobby horses, arriving nowhere.

Every team or workgroup carries a certain level of dysfunction. The question for the leader is "How much is too much?" When do these destructive processes distract from the task enough that they need to be addressed? In our second example, the manager had improved productivity, but he knew something was still wrong.

Far more difficult for the leader is the ability to recognize that a whole group process needs to be addressed. The manager in the first example was not able to do this. She was too caught up in seeing the men as "the problem". Eventually, a critical incident was brought on by poor communication within the whole team - not just between the men and women - that ended in one of the men leaving and bad press for the team's project.

A leader can usually recognize BA Dependency more readily because it is so uncomfortable for him. He is either exhausted by constant demands, irritated at others' lack of initiative, or frustrated that the things he wants done are not happening. His dilemma is how to extract himself from the pattern. The impulse might be to confront or chastise the group with what they are doing or not doing, but this would just perpetuate the dynamic. The manager in our example was able to make a successful change through a major shift in his leadership style. He began to see himself as a listener and coach.

Good leadership is key to containing the power of these processes. After the leader has provided a clear framework of goals, roles, and procedures, she will still need support in seeing and addressing these more elusive processes affecting team performance. The best support will come from someone with a social/psychological perspective who can facilitate her reflection. Interestingly, the team leader in the first example had a supervisor who was enmeshed in the process, took her "side", and supported her in educating the men.