The NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change: Principles, Practices, and Perspectives, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER EIGHTEENTHE NATURAL DEVELOPMENT OF WORK GROUPSEmergent Leadership^a

Donald T. Brown

Introduction

From the assembly line to the boardroom, more and more of our daily work is done in small groups. Some groups, like project teams, have a fixed membership and a limited life span. Others, such as boards and committees, go on indefinitely and may change their composition regularly. Both the extensive literature on small groups and corporate folk wisdom suggest that recently assembled groups operate differently from well-established ones. There is, however, some disagreement over just how groups develop over time.

The first conceptual models for group development were published in the late 1940s. These early models were based on individual ...