ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how all of us can participate in the democratic life of a group or team, through understanding the different styles of relating which challenge traditional, disempowering practices of bureaucracies. When groups work well, members share responsibility, support each other, and learn from one another without too much interference from an external manager. Members of cohesive groups try harder to influence other members, are more open to being influenced themselves, listen more carefully, are more accepting, are prepared to self-disclose, and experience greater levels of security and relief from tension. For groups, emergence means behaviours that arise through the interaction of people, and not as a summation of individual relationships. Effective and professional people or teams become targets for vilification, and get incorrectly identified as being “over-resourced, lazy, over-staffed, or disengaged”. Groups and teams are complex dynamic systems grounded on what emerges from the relationships between us.
