ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

82 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPStage Three: Group Work and Functional FamiliarityIf the group deals successfully with the fusion assumption, it usuallyachieves an emotional state that can best be characterized as mutualacceptance. The group will have had enough experience so thatmembers not only know what to expect of each other—what wecan think of as functional familiarity—but also will have had thechance to learn that they can coexist and work together even ifthey do not all like each other. The emotional shift from maintainingthe illusion of mutual liking to a state of mutual acceptance andfunctional familiarity is important in that it frees up emotionalenergy for work. Being dominated by either the dependence or thefusion assumption ties up emotional energy because of the denialand defensiveness required to avoid confronting the disconfirmingrealities. Therefore, if a group is to work effectively, it must reach alevel of emotional maturity at which reality-testing norms prevail.At this stage a new implicit assumption arises, the work assumption:“We know each other well enough, both in a positive and negativelight, that we can work well together and accomplish ourexternal goals.”Now the group exerts less pressure to conform and builds normsthat encourage some measure of individuality and personal growth,on the assumption that the group ultimately will benefit if all membersgrow and become stronger. However, because many groupsnever get to this stage, some observers judge groups as inherentlydemanding of conformity. In my own experience, high conformitypressures are symptomatic of unresolved issues in the group, and thebest way to get past them is to help the group to a more mature stage.As Bion (1959) pointed out, groups always have some kind oftask, even if that task is to provide learning or therapy to its members;so the need to work, to fulfill the task, is always psychologically present.But the ability to focus on the task is a function of the degree towhich group members can reduce and avoid their own anxieties.Such anxieties are intrinsically highest when the group is very youngand has not yet had a chance to build up cultural assumptions to con-