Group Dynamics in Senior Teams
Group dynamics in senior teams begin before a senior leadership team has established a recognisable team dynamic. They begin as group dynamics: the conscious and unconscious patterns that form around authority, responsibility, participation, relationships, difference and the task. Before a senior team develops its established ways of communicating, relating and working together, a group of people comes together. From that point onwards, patterns begin to form around who takes responsibility, who participates, how authority is used, how conflict is managed and what happens when things become difficult.
The way people come together can support effective group dynamics or create patterns that later become difficult for the senior team to shift. Some of what shapes those dynamics will be visible and conscious. Some of it will not. Understanding this can help us move beyond asking: “What is wrong with this team?” towards becoming more curious about: “What is happening in this group, and what might the group need next?”
Groups Have Conscious and Unconscious Dynamics
One useful way of understanding group dynamics comes from Wilfred Bion’s work on groups. Bion proposed that groups can operate simultaneously through what he described as work-group mentality and basic-assumption mentality (Bion, 1961). Later systems-psychodynamic writers extended this thinking to include one-ness, or we-ness, and me-ness (Turquet, 1974; Lawrence et al., 1996). Other interpretations of Bion’s work have emphasised that these are not simply different kinds of groups. They are ways of understanding different mentalities that can exist within the same group and influence its capacity to remain connected with its task (French & Simpson, 2010).
The Work Group
The work group focuses primarily on the reality of the task. It can think about what is happening, engage with the work that needs to be done, recognise interdependencies and make use of the different contributions available within the group. For senior teams, this matters because a group does not need to be free from tension or difficulty to function effectively. It needs to remain sufficiently connected with reality and with the work it is there to do.
Basic-Assumption Activity
Alongside work-group activity, basic-assumption activity can emerge as a way of managing anxiety. Bion identified three basic assumptions:
Dependency: the group behaves as though the leader, or another authority figure, has the answer and can take responsibility for what happens.
Fight-flight: the group responds to anxiety by fighting something or somebody, or by avoiding the difficult issue altogether.
Pairing: hope becomes invested in two people, or in the idea that somebody or something will emerge and resolve the group’s difficulty.
These dynamics matter because they can look like ordinary workplace behaviour.
A senior leader who finds that nobody will make a decision without them may conclude that the team lacks initiative.
A senior team that repeatedly blames another department may conclude that the other department is simply the problem.
Two people who repeatedly step in to rescue a struggling project may be praised for taking responsibility.
From a group-dynamics perspective, however, we can become curious about what function these behaviours are serving for the wider group.
What anxiety is being managed?
What responsibility is being avoided?
What reality is becoming difficult to stay in contact with?
That curiosity can change the intervention we choose.
Anxiety Is Not Necessarily the Problem
The aim is not to remove anxiety from groups. Work groups are not groups without difficulty, tension or emotion. The distinction is more about whether the group remains able to think and work while those things are present. In Bion’s work, work-group functioning involves maintaining contact with reality and continuing to engage with the task rather than becoming organised primarily around managing anxiety (Bion, 1961). This gives us another way of looking at difficult group dynamics in senior teams. Instead of asking whether tension exists, we can ask what the team is able to do with that tension.
Me-ness and We-ness in Senior Teams
Bion’s original work focused on dependency, fight-flight and pairing. Later systems-psychodynamic writers extended this thinking to include me-ness and one-ness, often discussed as we-ness (Turquet, 1974; Lawrence et al., 1996). I find these ideas particularly useful in organisational work because they help us think about what happens when either individuality or togetherness starts to become a defence against the reality of the work.
Me-ness
Me-ness describes a dynamic in which individuals retreat into themselves and psychologically disconnect from the group. Engagement with the group may feel difficult, frustrating or threatening, while independence and self-reliance become safer positions.
In senior teams, this may look like:
“I’ll just focus on my own area.”
leaders protecting their own function rather than considering the whole;
withholding information or contribution;
low investment in collective decisions;
distancing from team difficulties;
focusing on individual or departmental performance while collective performance deteriorates;
treating dependency on colleagues as weakness.
A senior leadership team can therefore contain highly capable individuals while still struggling to function as a group. This becomes particularly important when the work is genuinely interdependent. If leaders need one another to complete the task but organise themselves as though they do not, the team cannot make full use of its collective capacity.
We-ness
We-ness sits at the other end of this dynamic. Turquet’s concept of one-ness, later developed within systems-psychodynamic thinking, describes a group seeking safety through becoming part of a powerful unified whole (Turquet, 1974; Lawrence et al., 1996).
At first glance, this can look highly positive. The senior team may appear cohesive. People may speak strongly about us, loyalty, shared identity and being “all in this together”. But cohesion and effective group dynamics are not necessarily the same thing. When we-ness becomes defensive, maintaining unity can become more important than engaging with difference or reality.
It may look like:
disagreement being experienced as disloyalty;
pressure to “get on board”;
people withholding concerns because they do not want to disrupt the group;
a strong sense that “this is how we do things here”;
outsiders being positioned as the problem;
difference being welcomed only while it does not challenge the dominant position;
consensus becoming more important than critical thinking.
Defensive we-ness can therefore contribute to conditions in which groupthink becomes more likely. A strong collective identity is not the problem. Shared identity can be valuable. The difficulty begins when belonging requires people to reduce their own judgement, difference or dissent.
Effective Senior Teams Need Both a ‘Me’ and a ‘We’
An effective work group does not require people to choose between individuality and belonging. People need enough me to think independently, bring their own perspective, take responsibility and retain the capacity to disagree. They also need enough we to recognise interdependence, participate in a collective task and understand that their actions affect other people. When me-ness becomes defensive, the group fragments. When we-ness becomes defensive, individuality and difference can disappear. The work is not to eliminate either the individual or the collective. It is to create conditions in which people can remain distinct while still being meaningfully connected to the group and its purpose.
For senior leaders, that creates some useful questions:
Where are people retreating into “me”?
Where are people being absorbed into “we”?
What happens when somebody disagrees with the group?
Can people remain connected while holding different perspectives?
Are we genuinely interdependent, or are we operating either as separate individuals or through expectations of conformity?
The quality of group dynamics in senior teams is not determined simply by how cohesive the group looks. It also depends on whether people can retain a sense of themselves while contributing to something collective.
How Group Dynamics Show Up in Senior Leadership Teams
In my own work with teams, I find it useful to translate these ideas into several practical elements:
Reality – can the group work with what is actually happening?
Interdependence – does the group understand how members depend on one another?
Clear task – is there enough clarity about what the group exists to do?
Clear contribution – do people understand how they contribute to that task?
Difference harnessed – can different perspectives genuinely influence the group?
Leadership and followership – is there reciprocity between those leading and those following?
Context – is the group able to recognise how organisational conditions are shaping what happens within it?
These elements interact. A weakness in one area can easily show up elsewhere as a relationship, communication, or performance problem. What appears to be interpersonal conflict may partly reflect ambiguity about roles. What looks like resistance may contain important information about the reality of a proposed change. What appears to be poor leadership may also involve a group that has become highly dependent on the leader. What looks like disengagement may reflect a context in which people have learned that their contribution makes little difference. Looking only at individual personalities can therefore leave a substantial part of the group dynamic unexplored.
Reality Matters
One of the most important elements for me is reality. Reality allows a group to talk about the things that might otherwise be easier to keep under wraps. It includes people’s experiences, thoughts and feelings alongside the formal organisational position or preferred version of events. It enables the group to ask: What is actually happening here? That can be uncomfortable. Reality does not always support the company line.
It may reveal:
that people do not agree;
that workload is unrealistic;
that a decision has already been made despite the appearance of consultation;
that the senior team does not understand or agree on its purpose;
that different functions are working towards competing outcomes;
that a leader is carrying responsibility that belongs to the wider group;
or that everybody knows about a problem that nobody feels able to name.
The difficulty with reality is that it reduces the space available for denial. Denial can serve an important psychological function when individuals, teams or organisations are managing anxiety, so simply telling people to “be honest” is unlikely to be enough. Groups need enough capacity to stay engaged with difficult information without immediately defending against it, locating the problem elsewhere or rushing towards a solution.
Psychological Safety and Reality
This connects closely with psychological safety. Edmondson (1999) described team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and found an association between psychological safety and team learning behaviour. Psychological safety does not mean removing discomfort. It can create conditions in which reality becomes easier to discuss. A senior team can feel comfortable because nobody challenges anything. That does not necessarily mean its group dynamics are effective.
Difference Is Only Useful If It Can Influence the Group
Senior teams frequently talk about valuing different perspectives. But having difference present in a room is not the same as harnessing difference. For difference to contribute to the group’s work, it needs some possibility of affecting what the group thinks, decides or does. Otherwise, a senior leadership team can contain considerable diversity while still reproducing the same assumptions. This is where groupthink becomes relevant. Janis (1982) used the term groupthink to describe patterns in which the drive towards consensus can inhibit critical evaluation of alternatives and suppress disagreement. From an inclusive perspective, the question is therefore not simply whether different people are present or whether they have been invited to speak.
We can also ask:
Whose perspective changes the conversation?
Whose disagreement is tolerated?
Whose expertise is assumed?
Who takes up space?
Who reduces themselves?
What happens when somebody challenges the preferred direction?
What does the group do with information that disrupts its existing understanding of itself?
These questions bring power into group dynamics.
They also connect directly with the argument I make in Inclusive Leadership: Navigating Organisational Complexity: inclusion is not something separate from everyday leadership practice. It is shaped through participation, whose needs are noticed, whether difference can influence decisions, and how leaders respond to complexity, competing demands and organisational realities (Walsh, 2024).
Effective group dynamics in senior teams are therefore about more than whether people get along. They involve the conditions that allow people to contribute meaningfully to the work or, in Bion’s language, to the task.
Leadership and Followership Are Relational
Another important part of group dynamics in senior teams is the relationship between leadership and followership. Leadership does not happen independently of the group. Leaders need some degree of authorisation from followers to lead effectively, while followers need leaders to take up the authority and responsibility attached to their role. When that relationship becomes distorted, familiar patterns can emerge. A leader may become responsible for every decision. The group may wait to be told what to do. Or the opposite may happen: the leader does not take up enough authority and informal leaders begin filling the gap.
Difficulties attributed to “the leader” may therefore involve dynamics taking place between the leader, the group and the wider system.
Rather than asking only: “What is wrong with this leader?” we can also ask: “What is happening between leadership and followership here, and what does each need from the other for the group to work effectively?” This relational understanding also sits behind my wider work on inclusive leadership. Leadership is not simply something an individual leader does to other people. It is shaped through individual, relational, organisational and contextual influences (Walsh, 2024).
For individual leaders, these dynamics can be difficult to see from inside the system. Leadership coaching can create structured space to examine what is happening in a leader’s role, how they are responding to the group, what the group may be asking of them and whether their current response is helping to shift or reinforce the pattern.
Senior Teams Carry Their History
Patterns can become established within a group and continue long after the circumstances that originally produced them have changed. This is where the legacy of a senior team can affect how the current team interacts and performs. A new executive can arrive into an old dependency dynamic. New leaders can join a senior team where conflict has historically been avoided. A restructure can change formal responsibilities while informal authority remains exactly where it was before. A senior team can continue responding defensively to organisational conditions that no longer exist. The membership may change while parts of the group dynamic remain. This is one reason I pay particular attention to teams when they are forming or re-forming.
A restructure, merger, leadership change, new strategic direction or significant change in membership can all create a period in which group dynamics are being renegotiated. At those points, it can be useful to return to the foundations of the work group rather than immediately reaching for conventional team-building activities.
Team Building Is Not Always the Right Intervention
Team building often comes up when senior teams are struggling. Sometimes it is exactly what is needed. But not every senior team problem is a relationship problem. A leadership team may get along extremely well and still perform poorly because its collective task is unclear. People may trust one another but have competing accountabilities. A senior team may communicate frequently but avoid the one conversation that matters. Everyone may participate while the group repeatedly makes decisions without considering people affected outside the room.
If we diagnose every difficulty as a need for stronger relationships, we risk intervening in the wrong part of the system. In my experience working with teams, when we focus on the qualities of the work group, team building often follows more naturally. A functioning work group contains both task-oriented and relationship-oriented activity. People understand what they are there to do, how they depend on one another and how their different contributions matter. The relationships are not separate from the work. They develop through doing the work together.
Understanding Senior Team Dynamics Changes the Intervention
This is perhaps the most practically useful part of understanding group dynamics. It helps us distinguish between what is happening and what appears to be happening. If a senior team is already highly interdependent and works well relationally, another team-building exercise may achieve very little. The issue may instead be role clarity. It may be unclear authority. It may be competing organisational demands. It may be dependency on the leader. It may be avoidance of conflict. It may be an inability to use difference. Or the senior team may be functioning reasonably well while the organisational system around it makes the task extremely difficult.
This is why I am cautious about reaching too quickly for a preferred intervention. An effective response begins with understanding what is happening in this particular context, what different people need, what is helping or limiting performance and what the work requires next.
That principle sits at the centre of the Include-Performance Framework® Facilitator Programme. The programme develops practitioners’ capacity to work with competing needs, power, identity, culture, group dynamics and wider organisational systems rather than relying only on a preferred facilitation technique.
The intervention can then respond to the dynamic that is actually present rather than the behaviour that happens to be easiest to see. That requires curiosity and clarity before action.
A Process You Can Use With Your Senior Team
A simple starting point is to assess the foundations of your current group dynamics.
For each area below, ask two questions:
What happens in our team that supports this quality?
What happens in our team that limits this quality?
Reality
Can we discuss what is actually happening, including difficult information, differences in experience and things that may challenge the preferred narrative?
What supports reality in our team?
What limits reality in our team?
Interdependence
Do we understand how our work affects one another and where collaboration is necessary?
What supports interdependence?
What limits it?
Clear Task
Are we clear about what this senior team exists to achieve and what requires our collective attention?
What supports clarity of task?
What limits it?
Clear Contribution
Do people understand their own contribution and the contributions of others?
What supports collaboration and useful contribution?
What creates competition, duplication or ambiguity?
Difference Harnessed
Can different perspectives genuinely shape the group’s thinking and decisions?
What enables difference to influence our work?
What causes us to move towards agreement too quickly or ignore particular perspectives?
Leadership and Followership
Do followers authorise leaders to lead, and do leaders take up their responsibility in a way that enables others to contribute?
What supports effective reciprocity between leadership and followership?
What creates dependency, avoidance or over-reliance on particular people?
Context
What organisational conditions are shaping our team dynamics?
What belongs to this team?
What might actually be produced or reinforced by the wider organisation?
How to use it?
You can complete this individually as a leader or invite each team member to complete it anonymously and compare the patterns that emerge. The value is not in producing a perfect or “right” answer. It is much more about developing some insight and perhaps a hypothesis or two that you can begin testing. The process can make aspects of the group dynamics more visible.
If it highlights patterns that are difficult to interpret or shift, that does not automatically mean the team needs training or team building. It may point towards leadership coaching, facilitated team development, organisational development or another intervention entirely.
Understanding the need comes before selecting the solution. Once we can see more of the pattern, we have a better chance of choosing an intervention that responds to what the group actually needs. Sometimes the most useful question to ask about a struggling senior team is simply: “What is happening in this group, and what is that telling us about what the work needs next?”
This is also one of the ideas running through Inclusive Leadership: Navigating Organisational Complexity: effective leadership requires us to work with the complexity and reality of organisational life rather than reducing people, relationships or organisational problems to a simple set of behaviours (Walsh, 2024).
If you are trying to understand a senior team dynamic, leadership challenge or organisational issue and are uncertain about the most useful intervention, you can book a free consultation with ELIS Advantage. We can explore what is happening, what the need appears to be and whether coaching, facilitation, team development or another approach could be useful.
Frequently Asked Questions About Group Dynamics in Senior Teams
You can book a free consultation to discuss your needs and challenges confidentially.
What are group dynamics in senior teams?
Group dynamics in senior teams are the conscious and unconscious patterns that shape how senior leaders relate, communicate, use authority, manage difference, make decisions and work together around the collective task. They include visible aspects of teamwork alongside less visible dynamics involving power, anxiety, dependency, conflict, belonging, leadership and followership.
Why do group dynamics matter in senior leadership teams?
Senior team dynamics can influence decision-making, accountability, collaboration, conflict, inclusion and the team’s ability to engage with organisational reality. A senior team can contain highly capable leaders while still developing group patterns that limit collective performance.
What are Bion’s basic assumptions in group dynamics?
Bion (1961) identified three basic-assumption dynamics: dependency, fight-flight and pairing. Dependency involves looking towards a leader or authority figure to provide the answer. Fight-flight involves fighting against or avoiding a perceived threat. Pairing involves investing hope in two people, or in an anticipated solution, to resolve the group’s difficulty.
What are me-ness and we-ness in senior teams?
Me-ness can appear when individual leaders retreat into their own roles, responsibilities or expertise and disconnect from the collective task. We-ness can appear when maintaining unity, belonging or a shared position becomes more important than difference, dissent or critical thinking. Both can become defensive when they reduce the senior team’s ability to engage with reality and the work.
How can group dynamics affect senior team performance?
Group dynamics can influence whether a senior team can work with reality, use difference, make decisions, share accountability, manage competing needs and recognise how organisational conditions are shaping the work. What appears to be a performance problem may sometimes be linked to role ambiguity, dependency, avoidance, power, competing priorities or wider organisational conditions.
What is the relationship between psychological safety and senior team dynamics?
Psychological safety can support people to take interpersonal risks, including raising concerns, questioning assumptions and offering different perspectives. It does not require a senior team to be free from discomfort or disagreement. A team in which nobody challenges anything may feel comfortable without necessarily functioning effectively.
How can leaders improve group dynamics in senior teams?
A useful starting point is to understand what is happening before selecting an intervention. Looking at reality, interdependence, the task, contribution, difference, leadership and followership, and organisational context can help senior leaders develop a clearer hypothesis about what the team may need. The intervention might then involve coaching, facilitated team development, organisational change or another response rather than assuming team building is always the answer.
When might leadership coaching help with senior team dynamics?
Leadership coaching can be useful when an individual leader wants space to examine how they are taking up their role, how they are responding to the group and whether their current responses may be shifting or reinforcing existing patterns. You can read more about leadership coaching at ELIS Advantage.
References
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Basic Books.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
French, R. B., & Simpson, P. (2010). The ‘work group’: Redressing the balance in Bion’s Experiences in Groups. Human Relations, 63(12), 1859–1878. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726710371231
Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes (2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin.
Lawrence, W. G., Bain, A., & Gould, L. J. (1996). The fifth basic assumption. Free Associations, 6(1), 28–55.
Turquet, P. M. (1974). Leadership: The individual and the group. In G. S. Gibbard, J. J. Hartman, & R. D. Mann (Eds.), Analysis of groups (pp. 349–371). Jossey-Bass.
Walsh, S. (2024). Inclusive leadership: Navigating organisational complexity. ELIS Institute. ELIS Advantage