This year, 2021, is the 25th anniversary of Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice. They grow up so fast! To celebrate, the journal published a special 25th anniversary issue in September. For that issue, I invited all the past editors of the journal to submit an article on a topic near and dear to them that focuses on group dynamics, to review the research over the past 25 years on that topic, and to provide a roadmap for the next 25 years. You can read the articles, including my open access (free to download) introduction at the journal websiteopens in new window.
In the first article, Donelson Forsyth, who was Group Dynamics’ very first editor reviews the theory and research of cohesion in teams and groups. The concept of cohesion has taken centre stage in much of group dynamics research, but it is not consistently defined, and its measurement is fraught with many issues. And so, even though cohesion has caught the imagination of many researchers and practitioners, its status as a scientifically defined concept remains murky. Dr. Forsyth presents an integrative model of cohesion defined a group’s degree of unity, and he distinguishes cohesion from its causes and outcomes. In a second article, Dennis Kivlighan reflects on research addressing the question, “What is the group?” That is, Kivlighan considers research on individual effects, group member interaction effects, and group effects on individual and group outcomes. It turns out the answer to the question “What is the group?” is complicated and multilayered. Kivlighan looks more closely at statistical methods to disentangle individual, mutual, and group effects in group research. He provides an accessible introduction to actor-partner interdependence modeling and response surface analysis to disaggregate the effects of complex sets of interactions that occur in groups.
In the third article of the special 25th anniversary issue, Craig Parks discusses the concept and research on cooperation in groups. Cooperation for collective action is a basic feature of most successful groups, but maintaining it is very difficult. Whereas cohesion refers to the attraction of the group to the individual that allows the individual to achieve their personal goals, cooperation requires the individual to subsume their personal goals for the good of the whole. In the fourth article, David Marcus provides a personal tour of the social relations model (SRM) as a means of researching group interactions. The SRM uses round-robin data in which each individual member rates their influence on other group members, and in which other group members rate they’re on each individual. The SRM estimates each group member’s actions and interactions that have a consequence for the entire group. In this manner, SRM is an ideal method for studying inter-relationships among group members. Despite its promise, SRM has only been applied in only a limited manner in group research. Marcus reintroduces Group Dynamics readers to SRM and encourages them to give this methodology a try to test real life and meaningful aspects of groups and their functioning. Finally, I wrote an article that attempts to integrate two key and emerging theories in group psychology and group psychotherapy research. In my article, I discuss the concept of mentalizing (or reflective functioning) that derives from clinical and developmental psychology, and its synergy with the group psychology concept of team mental models (or team cognition). The goal of my article is to encourage cross fertilization between these two concepts that until now have remained within their respective silos. Group psychology and group psychotherapy are both interested in human behavior as it occurs in groups, but these two domains bifurcated decades ago. This paper is an attempt at a rapprochement by examining how the concepts of reflective functioning and team cognition can inform each other.
Learn more about this journal issue on the APA Publishing highlights article about it.