Kurt Lewin, who was born in Poland and died in America in 1947, is perhaps the most significant social psychologist of the last century. The breadth of his knowledge – Gestalt psychology, depth psychology, experimental psychology – gave him the foundation to develop group dynamic research settings as well as to conceptualise typical patterns of …
Every team is dependent upon its members identifying with the goals. Only in this way can the goal be maintained. A lack of identification can be dealt with, either through a change in goals, insofar as one can find agreement within the team to an adjustment and so long as there is decision-making scope at …
Team development, team building, team coaching – all these are terms for counselling formats which should help teams to function better. Therein lies the realisation that managers, with their leadership power alone, cannot bring team members to cooperate at work (in that case coaching would be sufficient). This viewpoint has, in the meantime, become established …
It is a noteworthy phenomenon how common the tendency is, among practitioners as well as theoreticians, to develop normative models for teams: How does ‘correct’ teamwork function? What does an ‘optimal’ team look like? We do not find the answers to such questions helpful. The conditions and the constraints under which teams work, the objectives …
Metatheory means occupying oneself with other theories, utilising the help of defined theoretical principles. In addition to findings from almost a thousand team workshops, we have attempted to examine as many relevant and established counselling fields, dealing with teams/groups, as possible. The questions have always been: Why do certain methods succeed, how do they explain …
A team must be able to keep its goal definition stable. This is not trivial, because every team is subjected to forces which question the existing goals. These impulses can emerge from different environments: the organisation, the team members, customers and suppliers desire change. If a team is not to be constantly disturbed (and can …
Every system forms patterns so as to be capable of decision-making. It cannot decide everything anew each time. Therefore, like in psychodynamics, an engagement with the history of the team is very helpful in discovering and understanding which patterns, utilised in the present, underlie all decisions. A team also learns, from the first moments of …
The distinction between system and environment is the starting point for systems theory. It is an alternative to the idea that things in the world simply exist. Instead, it assumes that everything can only be understood if it is seen in context (=environment). This means that when one talks about a ‘something’, there are always …
Teams differentiate themselves from their environments as a system. The particularity of teams is that they have two environments which they must consider if they wish to last: the organisation and the members of the team (if you have not yet become familiar with the distinction between system/environment, please first read more about it here). …
Teams are differentiated from their environments as a system. The particularity about teams is that they have two environments which they must consider if they wish to last – the organisation and the members of the team (if you are not yet familiar with the distinction between system/environment, please first read more about it here). …