Leadership in Chaordic Organizations

Chapter 4

Collective Group Dynamics: A New View of High-Performance Teams

B. E. White

Introduction

“Collective Group” in the chapter title denotes an aggregation of people that share some common interests and have energy around delving into a given set of topics. Members of such a group may be loosely or tightly connected. They may or may not have consciously volunteered to be part of the group. They could be part of an outside-directed team focused on a well-defined objective, but not necessarily. Actually, we are more interested in exploring self-organizing and self-directed groups that pursue emergent (not imposed or predefined) objectives, and highlighting their collective behaviors.

Our thesis is that such groups can emulate and even ...