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To be human is to be a member of myriad groups. The universality of groups in our lives poses an important area of study for social scientists investigating human flourishing. Additionally, inquiring into the evolutionary potential of groups may begin to inform new ways of addressing the intractable issues we face as a human species. While most empirical studies of groups focus on group performance, or group doingness, this study explored group beingness and the experience of manifesting deep union and oneness, which is an intersubjective phenomenon that has been called coherence. Intersubjective coherence is often written about from a theoretical and conceptual perspective, as well as from a practice perspective, but it has rarely been investigated empirically. This interpretive phenomenological investigation of coherence inquired into the phenomenon through the facilitation of two group coherence treatments immediately followed by group interviews. The study’s design enabled the exploration of coherence from the intersubjective perspective, allowing for participants to make meaning of their coherence experiences in community. Findings revealed what it was like for participants to experience coherence, how the groups shifted into coherence, and the antecedents and outcomes associated with coherence. Additionally, five meta-themes, Direct Experience of Interbeing, Constructive Disorientation, Co-sensing, Metalogue, and Best Me, Best We, were identified revealing a broader context as well as the ways in which the participants made meaning of the experiences. A key outcome of the study was an empirically-based definition of coherence: coherence is a group-level phenomenon wherein members experience a collective shift into a heightened state of connectedness marked by a quieting, slowing, and calming of the group climate, an activation of an enlivened intersubjective field, and a calling forth for members' best selves resulting in an acceptance and celebration of differences among members. The shift is aided by skillful means, and members are able to process and make sense of the experience through somatic, emotional, spiritual, and creative ways of knowing. Coherence experiences are often accompanied by individual and collective awakenings. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

The advent of inclusive educational practices in the United States in recent decades has prompted a need for increased and improved levels of collaboration among general and special education teachers. The purpose of this qualitative, holistic, collective case study was to develop an in-depth understanding of general and special education teachers’ best practices for effective collaboration in kindergarten through eighth grade public education inclusion classrooms in Southwest Virginia. This study investigated two teams of general and special education teachers who were demonstrating effective collaborative practices. This study sought to answer the central research question: What are general and special education teachers’ best practices for effective collaboration in K-8 public education inclusion classrooms in Southwest Virginia? The theories guiding this study were Tuckman’s stages of small group development and Vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theory. Data was collected through interviews, cognitive representations, and artifacts. Data analysis occurred by organizing data into patterns and themes to conduct a within-case analysis of each case and cross-case analysis across the two cases of inclusion teams. This study revealed the following themes and sub-themes as best practices for inclusion teams at each stage of group development: (a) communication (talking, planning, reflecting); (b) teamwork (sharing, together, equal, support); (c) attitude (perspective, trust, respect, willing); and (d) perseverance (work, effort). The results provided insights to help other collaborative teams succeed in becoming cohesive, compatible partnerships who can work together for the success of their general and special education students.

This dissertation explores the impact of formal staff training and field leadership on the ability of student leaders to correctly discern the appropriate styles of leadership for specific outdoor recreation-based situations. The relationship between the situational leadership model (Hersey & Blanchard, 1980) and group development theory (Tuckman, 1965) was explored through the integration research of Weber and Karman (1991) and was used as a framework for this study. In order to develop an applicable form of this research for this study, the researcher developed an integrated dynamic model to provide a visual representation of the blending of the two theoretical frameworks. In addition to the exploration of formal staff training and field leadership experiences, analyses were conducted to determine if age, gender, race, previousoutdoor recreation experience, or outdoor recreation degree seeking significantly affected the students’ awareness or their dominant styles of leadership. The literature study indicated a strong relationship between situational leadership and outdoor recreation (Breunig, O'Connell, Todd, Anderson, & Young, 2010; Shooter, Paisley, & Sibthorp, 2009; Sibthorp, Paisley, & Gookin, 2007; Sutherland & Stroot, 2010), but little, if any, research exists on the development of situational leadership in outdoor leaders. The quantitative nature of this study stemmed from the lack of research in the outdoor recreation field from this approach. As most previous research in outdoor recreation utilized small populations (i.e., a single group of people participating in an outdoor recreation activity), this study examined a larger group of participants utilizing a quantitative approach. In total, 106 student outdoor leaders from various Midwestern United States university outdoor recreation programs participated in a three-part study that tested their awareness of situational leadership through the Outdoor Leadership Survey (OLS), which utilized the Expedition Leader Style Analysis (ELSA; Phipps & Phipps, 2003). The survey was administered prior to the formal staff training, at the conclusion of the staff training, and after a minimum of 7 days of field leadership experience. The results were paired and analyzed for significance. T tests of related samples indicated no significant difference in situational leadership awareness scores (SLAS) and the formal staff training or field leadership experience. Though no significant results were found in the study it was noted that the calculations were unable to control for various presentation styles of leadership development information. The varying structure of the formal staff training and field leadership experiences coupled with the low statistical power due to limited data points could have caused non-significant results. In terms of demographic differences, chi-square tests were conducted to examine relationships between dominant leadership styles and the reported variables. Reported p values were > .05 for all tests, with the exception of the change in dominant leadership style when compared to gender in post-training results, p = .049. Of the many demographic areas studied, gender was the only factor with a significant difference in the dominant leadership style of a student leader and the difference was only seen after the formal staff training. Though the aspects of the formal staff training that caused this difference are currently unknown, the study recommended that directors of outdoor recreation programs examine the content and presentation of material during staff trainings to determine if the training is being presented in such a way that a particular style of leadership is preferred instead of a balanced approach, when related to gender. And finally, although not significant, the effect of prior participation showed a difference in dominant leaderships styles compared to the general college student trend from pre-training scores. These results were attributed to the newer staff being more open to various leadership approaches while senior staff had settled on a particular dominant style that they would use in most situations as a reflection of their formalleadership as a college student (Haber, 2012). The study recommended that those directing programs to continually observe senior staff members to ensure the use of a well-rounded leadership approach based on these findings. In doing so the director can work toward a staff consisting of both new and senior members who all utilize a well-rounded leadership style approach instead of reliance on a single dominant style.

This study was conducted for two purposes. The first was to find out trend patterns for perceived social loafing, the four types of intra-group conflict (i.e., task, relationship, logistic, and contribution), and positive vs. negative emotions, in the group's developmental process. The second was to explain how perceived social loafing was aroused based upon the knowledge of intra-group conflicts and negative emotions. Participants (n = 164) were required to report their personal perception of social loafing, intra-group conflicts, emotions (i.e., anger, fatigue, vigor, confusion, tension, depression, and friendliness), and the stage of group development, in their current small group interaction. Four major findings emerged out of the data analysis. First, perceived social loafing, relationship conflict, logistical conflict, contribution conflict, and negative emotions all followed a reversed V-shaped trend of development with their respective peaks observed at Stage 2 (i.e., Counterdependency and Fight), whereas task conflict followed a slanted, N-shaped, but relatively stable, trend over the course of group development. Second, positive emotions developed in a V-shaped trend pattern, wherein the lowest point was observed at Stage 2 and highest point at Stage 4 (i.e., Work). Third, the perception of social loafing was found to be directly and positively influenced by contribution conflict and negative emotions, while task conflict, logistical conflict, and relationship conflict did not have direct positive effects on perceived social loafing. However, task conflict was found to have a marginally significant direct suppressing effect upon perceived social loafing once the influences from logistic conflict, contribution conflict, relationship conflict and negative emotions were controlled for. Fourth, the current study also found that the perception of social loafing might not always trigger negative emotions in the group, because social compensation might offset the negative consequences that perceived social loafing was likely to bring to the group.

The purpose of this study was to explain the effectiveness of an offsite workshop involving the one hundred top managers of a large multinational enterprise. The workshop created a shift in the participants' pattern of interpersonal engagement from one marked by political and strategic jousting to one marked by trust, openness and unity. The transition facilitated a shift in corporate strategy from a highly diverse to a unified global strategy, and was engineered through group and interpersonal exercises interspersed with informal conversations with the firm's chief executives. The theory of togethering emerged from a Grounded Theory analysis (Glaser, 1978, 1998; Glaser and Strauss, 1967) of the field notes and video footage of the workshop's facilitators, transcripts of interviews done retrospectively by the author with the participants, and company documents. It explains a transformation in the participants' experience as triggered by shifts in strategic needs, punctuated by two orchestrated interventions, and manifested in three group states. The first intervention involved the disruption of political patterns of engagement(first state) and was accomplished by creating insecurity and anxiety, overexposing participants to each other, taking them out of their natural environment, divesting them of their symbols of status, and having the top leaders engage with them in an unexpectedly informal manner. This lead to a state of confusion (second state), setting the stage for the second intervention, which the participants characterized as getting to know each other. Here they bonded with each other both interpersonally and as a group through a reinforcing cycle of introspection, sharing, and witnessing. Getting to know each other in turn led to a state of communion (third state) in which members felt open towards each other and experienced a sense of collective endeavor. This in turn had reverberations that attended to strategic and structural needs in other parts of the organization, for example, in subunit boards, in interpersonal relations within and across subunits, and in the styles of individual leaders. The thesis extends theories of strategic management (Donald C. Hambrick, 1994), group development (Gersick, 1988; Tuckman, 1965), attachment theory (Fosha, 2000; Fosha and Yeung, 2006), and ritual processes (Turner, 1969).

It has been long known that groups of adults learn and enact their learning in certain ways; what is little known is how groups learn and how they develop in cognitive complexity. This dissertation proposes a theory of group cognitive development by arguing that intentional adult groups are complex and dynamic, and that they have the potential to evolve over time. Groups are complex in that they are made up of individuals within different orders of consciousness (Kegan), and they are dynamic in that different orders of consciousness interact and conflict (Lonergan) during the formation and enactment of group vision, values, and procedures. Dynamic complexity theory of group development as it is referred to in this study is grounded in Robert Kegan’s constructive developmental theory and in Bernard Lonergan’s transcendental method. While both Kegan and Lonergan attend to the growth of individuals, their theories are adapted to groups in order to understand the cognitive complexity of groups, intragroup and intergroup conflict, and the mental complexity of leader curriculum. This theory is applied to two case studies, one from antiquity in the case of the first century Corinthian community engaged in conflict with its founder, St. Paul, and in one contemporary study of American Catholic parishioners engaged in contentious dialogue with diocesan leaders from 1994 to 2004. The parish groups experienced a series of dialogues during a ten year period over the issues of parish restructuring and the priest sexual abuse crisis yielding cumulative and progressive changes in perspective-taking, responsibility-taking, and in group capacity to respond to and engage local and institutional authority figures. Group development is observed against a pedagogical backdrop that represents a mismatch between group complexity and leader expectations. In Corinth, Paul’s curriculum was significantly beyond the mental capacity of the community. In the case of Catholic parishioners the curriculum of diocesan leaders was beneath the mental capacities of most of the groups studied. It is proposed that individuals sharing the same order of consciousness, understood as cognitive constituencies, are in a dynamic relationship with other cognitive constituencies in the group that interact within an object-subject dialectic and an agency-communion dialectic. The first describes and explains the evolving cognitive complexity of group knowing, how the group does its knowing, and what it knows when it is doing it (the epistemologies of the group). This dialectic has implications for how intentional groups might be the critical factor for understanding individual growth. The second dialectic describes and explains the changing relationship between group agency, which is enacted either instrumentally or ideologically; and group communion, which is enacted ideationally. The agency-communion dialectic is held in an unstable balance in the knowing, identity, and mission of groups. With implications for the fields of adult education and learning organizations, dynamic complexity theory of group development notes predictable stages of group evolution as each cognitive constituency evolves, and notes the significance of internal and external conflict for exposing the presence of different ways of knowing and for challenging the group toward cognitive growth.

This research developed a model of how learners in an e-learning environment evolved into a learning community despite their temporal and geographical separation from each other. The constant comparative method of analysis was used throughout open, axial, and selective coding procedures akin to the Grounded Theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin). Microscopic analysis centered primarily on comprehensive threaded discussion board data (more than 6,000 speech segments) for five graduate level courses, including both learner and instructor posts. Analysis revealed a substantive theory entitled Online GROUP Development that detailed five categorical stages - Greeting, Relating, Operating, Unifying, and Parting. The five stages outlined the process of how individuals, through their asynchronous threaded discussion board postings, evolved in their dialogue with one another to forge into an online learning community that evidenced increasing levels of cognitive, social, and affective evolvement with one another across time. Four properties, labeled 4C Interaction, were identified and further differentiated each process stage. Additional analysis revealed a structure that promoted and nurtured conditions that fostered the development process. These conditions were labeled the Main Conditions Present and included three sets of variables that provided the foundation from which the evolution of Online GROUP Development occurred.

Australian acceptance of middle schooling has been gaining momentum. The impetus behind the introduction of middle schooling in Australia has been to provide a more developmentally appropriate educational experience for Years 6-9 students (approximately ages 10-11—14-15) and a smoother transition between the traditional primary and secondary divide. An underpinning practice in the philosophy of middle schooling is small communities of teachers and students. Teachers working in a middle school environment are organised into small teaching teams that plan and teach together. Middle schooling practice, however, demands some reshaping of complex and multiple relationships among teachers. This reshaping includes collaborative planning, teaching, assessing, and reporting within teaching teams, together with closer relationships with students, administrative staff, parents, and the wider community. These collaborative tasks require teachers to negotiate a new complex web of interrelationships. Stages in group development have been explored in a variety of settings. Tuckman (1965) identified four stages in the development or “life cycle” of groups (i.e., forming, storming, norming, and performing) that have been shown to be transferable to groups across a number of disciplines. As newly formed middle school teaching teams evolve and work to complete these new collaborative tasks and negotiate these new relationships, they have been reported to progress through this same life-cycle. The way that these teams move through these progressive stages is important to the effective functioning of the team. This purpose of this study was to examine the formation, development and maintenance of four middle school teaching teams over the course of their first year as a team. This study aimed to identify factors that facilitate or hinder a positive trajectory for a team’s development and to explore the influence of a school’s culture on teaming practices. Teams involved in this study were all in government run middle schools in South East Queensland that introduced an holistic reform in the last decade. A multi-site case study approach was used. Qualitative data were gathered through semistructured individual interviews with core teaching staff in each team and through notes taken during participant observation days throughout the year. Comparisons of data within and across teams revealed six main characteristics that were found to either positively or negatively influence teaching teaming in the four teams from the three Queensland schools participating in the study. These characteristics concerned (a) training (i.e., both preservice and inservice); (b) administrative support throughout the teaming process (i.e., from formation to establishment and maintenance); (c) attitudes of team members to teaming (i.e., a willingness to participate in a team and experience and confidence in contributing to the team); (d) relationship building; (e) conflict; and (f) school culture. These results resonated with the research literature on the experiences of middle school teaming practices in the USA. A school’s culture was identified as one of the six defining characteristics of a team’s experience within the first question of the study. It was found to exert facilitating and inhibiting effects on the other 5 characteristics that were identified. Moreover, the results revealed several aspects of working in teams that teachers found challenging. A lack of specific training in teaming skills (i.e., either preservice or inservice) prevented teachers from establishing adequate team protocols (i.e., goals, rules, and roles) able to facilitate the smooth functioning of the team. Specifically, teachers generally demonstrated limited and ineffective means of dealing with conflict, which, in most instances, caused team development to stagnate or regress. Findings from this study has shown a gap between what the middle school literature has said about collaboration and teaming and how it is being implemented in these three Queensland middle schools. This study also demonstrates the urgent need for preservice and inservice training in teaming practices to occur concurrently with the introduction of a middle years’ reform in Australia. It also identifies a list of specific teaming skills that are required by teachers embarking on a teaming experience and a list of the facilitating and hindering factors to team formation and development at an individual, team, and school level.

Community-based environmental management (CBEM) groups are increasingly being advocated as appropriate approaches to addressing local environmental problems in New Zealand. However, there is a lack of recognition and understanding of the nature of success of these groups. This study investigates success from the perspectives of political science; sociology and social psychology; and environmental management. Theories of public participation and democracy; organisation and management; group development, dynamics and processes; communication; and Integrated Environmental Management (IEM) are used to develop a model that explains the dynamic nature of success. The model identifies relationships and interactions between factors for success, combining the concepts of group development, organisation and structure, IEM, and partnership approaches to environmental management. It also identifies the relative importance of factors for success according to the stages of development, reflecting the dynamic nature of success. A preliminary assessment of the model in a case study recognised the identification of relationships, interactions, and relative importance of success factors as the strengths of the model. Recommendations are made regarding improvements of the model, research into the role and specific needs of CBEM groups, into the political and economic conditions for CBEM groups, and development of facilitation guidelines for agencies.

The goal of this study was to attempt to develop a classification scheme that systematically related individual behavior, interpersonal behavior, and group interactions for the purpose of using the resulting classification scheme to evaluate theories of group development proposed by Bion, Bennis and Shepard, Bales, and Tuckman and Jensen. It was assumed that theorists' presuppositions about the structure of groups might influence their theories. Using a qualitative process of analysis, a structural classification scheme (SCS) was developed based upon transformative and generative rules, utilizing the General System Theory subsystem process of self-regulated boundary operations. The SCS protocol was employed to categorize and compare the theories of group development proposed by Bion, Bennis and Shepard, Bales, and Tuckman and Jensen. The resulting categorization of theories indicated that relationships existed among and between a group's structural properties, the complexity and type of communication connections among and between group members, and the size of the group. In addition, a common structural relationship was demonstrated to exist among and between individual, dyadic, and triadic group forms. A similar structural relationship was also speculated to exist between groups of any size. It was concluded that a structural approach to groups may offer insight to group leaders and members in recognizing and creating alternative frameworks that best fit a group's structure to its task. This approach may have broad implications in that it suggests that group goals might best be considered before the structure of the group is determined. In addition, a structural approach was also speculated to be an emotionally neutral alternative method of discussing individual and group behavior.