reflections on group work and group dynamics
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RETROSPECTIVEREFLECTIONS ONGROUP WORK ANDGROUP DYNAMICSRonald Lippitt aa Professor Emeritus, School ofSocial Work, University of Michigan,Ann Arbor, MI, 48109Published online: 18 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Ronald Lippitt (1982) RETROSPECTIVEREFLECTIONS ON GROUP WORK AND GROUP DYNAMICS, Social WorkWith Groups, 4:3-4, 9-19
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J009v04n03_04
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RETROSPECTIVE REFLECTIONS ON GROUP WORK AND GROUP DYNAMICS
Ronald Lippitt
ABSTRACT. The development and history of gmup dynamics and its connection lo social work is described through the personal recollections of the author. Of particular interest in this history is the role of Kun Lewin, the National Training Laboratories. and a number of social group work pioneers: Grace Coyle, Gordon Heam, Fritz Redl and others.
In 1932 1 went to Springfield College.to study youth work because of the influence of a professional youth .worker, the county Hi Y secretary, and two,group work volunteers, a scout master who introduced me to wilderness canoe tripping and a second one who supported my upward mobility from patrol member to patrol leader to junior assistant scoutmas- ter. Their influence led me to choose group work as a career in competition with the two attractive alternatives, journalism and medicine.
Within the first two months of the first semester I was given my first field work placement as a club leader of a group of 10-12 year olds in a railroad YMCA in an economically deprived area of West Springfield.
My coursework included the class in group methods with my major professor L. K . Hall and laboratory courses in arts and crafts, in club programming, and recreational methods and games. In our weekly prac- ticum sessions all of us who were involved in field work met to share the experiences written up in our logs which received rather rigorous probing and critiques about the things we were leaving out and the insights we might derive for improving our leadership of our clubs. One of our models was the mimeographed case records written up by Grace Coyle's students. some model records prepared by juniors and seniors in our program. We had a variety of readings of Bush, Lieberman, Elliott, Dewey, and others.
The perspective I was getting at that time was that youth work was primarily club work, recreation, and camping, and also the idea that one
Ronald Lippitt is Professor Emeritus at the School of Social Work. University of Michi- gan. Ann Arbor, MI 48109.
Social Work With Groups. Vol. 4(3/4). FalUWinter 1981 @ 1982 by The Hawonh Press, lnc. All rights resewed. 9
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I0 SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS
might look upward to social agency administration as a possible step in one's career. In the second semester came a course on social agency administration.
As spring approached we all had a major practicum period out at the college camp, taking intensive courses in various aspects of camping- waterfront, nature study, program development, health and safety, camp- ing administration-to give us the skill repertoire we might need in finding summer camp jobs.
The underlying rationale for all this learning of group techniques was perhaps most frequently articulated in our discussions with L. K . Hall about the writings of such philosophical leaders as Eduard Lindeman and John Dewey. We got into frequent discussions about group method as a means rather than an end, the implications of democracy as involving our young clients in the formulation of their own goals and the development of their own discipline of group management as contrasted to coercive pat- terns of discipline and program direction.
An exciting expansion of perspective occurrcd in 1934 when my sum- mer camp job was under the direction of Jay Wayne Wrightstone, a student of John Dewey's and a leader in the Progressive Education movement. As director of nature study I was encouraged to initiate several mini-research activities. I was beginning to feel that there were a lot of unanswered questions and assumptions in what I was being caught as group work techniques and that I needed to learn a lot more about child psychology and motivation and even sociology, to be a more adequate professional.
A Serendipitous Expansion of Perspective
The very unexpected receipt of a college scholarship to spend my junior year abroad found me in the fall of 1934 sitting in the classes of Jean Piaget at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. It's hard to describe the excitement of listening to Piaget describe his ingenious explorations into the child's con- ception of the world, the development of his thinking and of his concepts of right and wrong. I became particularly interested in his studies of the stages of development of the child's understanding of the rules of the game of marbles, and what he could understand and accept as appropriate rules at different stages of his development. My interest in all types of games, and my experience with the leading of them and with getting children to under- stand'rules and to develop ideas of; "fair play" were the basis of many "aha experiences" as I became involved in Piaget's ingenious research methods for exploring where children really were at different stages of development.
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Ronald Lippirr I I
It became clear to me that significant inquiry involved a lot more than collecting enough data to create impressive statistical tables. I was eager to try out some of these ideas and approaches on my return for my senior year at Springfield.
I returned to an exciting, good life on campus. As a senior and a youth work major, my field placement in group work supervision involved giving leadership to a group of freshmen in developing cellar clubs of children in a deprived neighborhood. But because of my junior year's work in psychol- ogy, 1 was recruited by the new professor of psychology, Harold Seashore, to act as his student assistant in teaching a number of psychology courses. Professor Seashore came from a rigorous research tradition so 1 was soon involved in helping organize a variety of experimental projects for psy- chology classes. These ranged from managing a little population of guinea pigs and white rats to organizing fieldobservations of infants and preschool children. This new research-oriented and science-oriented part of my life- space infiltrated my group work activities and I organized several student research projects for our cellar club program. We were particularly in- terested in the influence on the children's behavior of some of the dif- ferences of leadership style and personality of the 6 or 7 club leaders in our project.
A new influence at this time was the discovery of Moreno and sociomet- ric techniques. We tried these out in diagnosing some of the relationships between club members and soon had sociometric pictures of all the groups up on the wall. I remember also being very interested in and influenced by Thrasher's study of youth gangs in Chicago and a book of case studies. I believe it was called "55 Bad Boys" by Hartwell.
As my senior year came to a close, 1 was beginning to feel that club work and camp work and recreational programs could learn quite a bit from research projects and that these kinds of field situations provided great opportunities for creative fact finding. The infectious enthusiasm of Piaget was beginning to spread for me into study of group activities.
Departure from Group Work
My professor (Seashore) decided I should profit by the opportunities of his alma mater, the University of Iowa. I should get into "real science" and continue in graduate work rather than going out into a group work agency job as 1 had planned. ~ o ' a telegram arrived offering me a half-time
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research assistantship in the Child Welfare Research Station at Iowa. The opportunity and the unknown were tempting. I was soon on a Greyhound bus for Iowa City.
My first research assignment was coding protocols from an experiment on frustration of preschool children under the supervision of a very boyish and exciting professor Lewin who communicated his ideas in rather dif- ficult German-accented English. But he had ingenious and exciting ideas about how to interpret the data on the behavior of the children. A whole new arena of theory and concepts and research techniques engulfed me.
When each of the professors at the Center passed around topics they would be interested in supervising as Masters' projects, one of the topics on the list under Professor Lewin's name said something about the struc- ture of groups. I felt groups were "my bag," so I made an appointment to go and talk to the Professor about the research topic. I soon found myself talking very freely about my experiences with groups in response to the professor's probing question about my interests. I found myself talking about my interests in discovering more about how leadership styles influ- enced the interaction of the members an.d their productivity in groups of children. At this time I had no idea that Professor Lewin had never done any research with groups and that the "group" topic he had in mind had to do with his ideas about the development of some theoretical work in which the term "group" was one of his mathematical notions. He never revealed his real intentions to me until over a year later. Instead he responded enthusiastically to my presentation of some ideas about critical differences in leadership style and some of the ways in which 1 felt I had observed their influence on the behavior of club members in my senior year project.
Very quickly Professor Lewin had me developing a research design to present to the Tuesday evening seminar of his graduate students, and working on finding a situation where I could create small clubs of children for experimental purposes. I felt excited and comfortable. 1 was planning group work program activities for a new kind of purpose. The first experi- ment with two clubs of elementary school children meeting at noon over in the lab school led to some very dramatic, observable, and quantifiable differences when I changed my role in each club from being a more democratic to a more authoritarian type of club leader. I remember that my training in values as a group worker prevented me from developing a very extreme authoritarian pattern. I used the khaviors which I had observed in the patterns of some of the more directive, but legitimate, club leaders. Dr. Lewin insisted that we rather carefully cor~ceptualize and spell out in detail the several dimensions on which my behavior should differ from one role
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to the other. Several fellow graduate students functioned as observers, recording the categories of behavior which we had theorized might be results of the differential impact of the two leadership styles.
The findings were so striking that Professor Lewin was eager for me to develop a more definitive project with more and more leaders. This we did in the fall of 1938 with a new partnership with a post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Ralph White, who had just arrived to work with Dr. Lewin. We recruited two other fellow students to make a team of four different leaders and worked hard on clarifying the different styles which we would utilize as we rotated leadership from one group to the other. We greatly increased the battery of data collection tools, and used Moreno's sociometric tech- niques to establish four clubs which would have comparable interpersonal relationship patterns.
The findings of these studies have been rather widely disseminated in the literature of social group work and social psychology.* I think our major interest here, as we look at the interaction between the long history of social group work and the about-to-be-born discipline of group dynamics is that the basic training as a group work practitioner was the necessary condition to have the mastery of skills for a valid experimental intervention in a systematic group experiment. Historically we can say that group dynamics was born with this experiment which unleashed the inter- est and creative energy of Kurt Lewin to think about small groups as an object of theoretical and experimental interest.
Return to Group Work
In 1941 Charles Hendry, a respected leader in the expanding field of social group work, invited me to join him as Director of Field Research in the National Council of the Boy Scouts. Here indeed was an opportunity to meld my training as a professional group worker with my newer training as a young social psychologist with an interest in doing research on groups. I had been very interested in "Chick" Hendry's research on camping and became an early member of the American Association for the Study of Group Work which he co-founded.
The problem of how to do meaningful research on character education had been a continuing puzzle for some time. I had, of course, been very interested in the classical researches of Hanshorne and May, and also
'White, Ralph and Ronald Lippitt. Autocracy and Democracy An Experim~nral Theory. New York, Harper and Brothers. 1960.
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involved in critical reviews of their methodology and design. We decided to develop four research field sites, and at each site select a comparative sample of "successful" and "unsuccessful" scout troops for an intensive study of differences in the leadership and other conditions that resulted in productive child outcomes which we conceptualized as symptoms of suc- cessful and unsuccessful "character development." Here I seized on the opportunity to bring a very conscious marriage between key resources from my group work life and my social science life.
I worked out a contract with one of my most exciting group work colleagues. Fritz Redl, at Wayne University to become one of the field sites with his social work students as the research assistants. Springfield College, with L. K. Hall, became a second field site. Kurt Lewin, with his team, became a third field site. We decided we would use the New York City arena where we were located as the fourth field site, and I employed Alvin Zander and Russell Hogrefe, from George Williams College, to be the leaders of the New York City pan of the project. 1 also recruited J . Wayne Wrightstone, Director of Research in the New York City Schools and my former camp director, to be chairman of our research committee.
The regular planning and seminar-like sessions of our research team, L. K. Hall, Fritz Redl, Kurt Lewin, John French, Alvin Zander, Russell Hogrefe, Chick Hendry, and myself were exciting integrations of Lewinian Theory, traditional group work concepts and methods, the psychoanalytic insights of Fritz Redl, and many new creations of concept and method which emerged from our sessions. These were actualized in new ap- proaches. to data collection which combined systematic qualitative inquiry with' quantitative observation methods. These methods involved observers recording by two-minute intervals directly on mark-sensing IBM cards for immediate quantitative processing.
The series of reports which emerged from "The Eighteen Troop Study" and from subsequent summer camp studies were published in a research series entitled Scouting for Facrs. But World War 11 interrupted this emerg- ing integration of group work theory and practice and the new corner of social psychology which could best be labeled at this time as Lewinian ~ r b u ~ Psychology.
The years 1943-1945 are not particularly relevant to this retrospective review. I was busy using all of my resources of group work and social psychology in the operation of a psychological warfare school for OSS for Far Eastern operations. I discovered a lot more about the relevance of Moreno's psychodramatic and sociodrama.tic techniques and learned a lot of cross-cultural applied anthropology which became a very important new part of my repertoire as I prepared for post-war continuity.
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The Quatrtum Leap to Group Dynamics
In 1945 Kurt Lewin founded the Rescarch Center for Group Dynamics at M.I.T. with a team of five associates recruited from those who had worked with him at Iowa and Harvard. The e'nthusiastic group of doctoral candidates came from social work, business administration, clinical psy- chology, sociology, experimental psychology, and engineering. The focus was on laboratory experiments and field experiments which would probe into the dynamics of group life as related to individual functioning and the functioning of organizations and larger social systems. During the same year, Charles Hendry accepted the directorship of The Commission on Community Interrelations of the Amcrican Jewish Congress, also founded by Kun Lewin in collaboration with Rabbi Wise. This was to be the spearhead for the development of applied group dynamics, with the focus on inquiries into intercultural relations and the phenomena of the interper- sonal basesof prejudice and conflict. These two new centers of scientific and applied work were pushing for a newscientific basis for the understanding of group phenomena and widening the arena of applied work with groups to the community context of intergroup conflict and social action.
One of the early marriages of group work method and skills with the new discipline of group dynamics was the acceptance by the senior scien- tist team and the doctoral researchers at M.I.T. that in the conduct of valid laboratory group experiments and experimental field projects tbe skills of group work were necessary to create valid social phenomena for study, and to get the acceptance and collaboration of research "subjects" (clients) to carry out valid inquiry phenomena. I frequently found myself conducting group skill development sessions with our young scientists as they prepared for what have become some of the classical group laboratory experiments and field studies. One of my graduate students, Gordon Hearn, was a great help because he was an experienced social group worker with professional training at George Williams College.
In 1946, a team from the Connecticut State Commission on Intergroup Relations came to the Research Center to request help on improving the effectiveness of their programs to combat discrimination and intergroup conflict. I was asked to design an experimental field project to see what could be done to change the attitudes and behaviors of key community leaders and groups. We decided we would study the relative importance of training teams versus singletons, and of working with persons who had high power as contrasted to lower power positions in the communities. With the state team we developed a recruitment design to create these two variations and we developed a measurement program to assess all the
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participants before the experimental workshop and again some months afterward. We decided we would need three experienced trainers to work with the recruited participants, so I recruited two colleagues I had worked with on previous projects, Dr. Leland Bradford and Dr. Kenneth Benne. Dr. Lewin was to take the role of research director during the workshop period and we recruited three of our doctoral candidates to function as group observers during the group sessions of the workshop.
This workshop and its findings have been fully reported elsewhere.* The main point for our study of the interrelation between group work and group dynamics is that part way through the workshop three of the panici- pants, by their own initiative, crashed the daily evening sessions of the trainer and research staff where the data of the day were being reviewed, and by adding their own observations greatly enriched the perspective on the phenomena which were being analyzed. This resulted in a new daily session in which all the participants met with the research and training staff to analyze the group processes which had occurred during the group ses- sions which were focused on action planning and the development of group leadership and team development skills. This process analysis proved such a powerful variable in influencing the productivity of the group's task work that we decided this discovery needed much more systematic development. Plans were made to conduct a workshop the following summer which was focused on each group using its own processes as the action research data for studying its own development. Leland Bradford was National Director of Adult Education at the National Education Association so we decided the appropriate sponsorship for the new workshop might be the National Education Association, Adult Education Division and the co-sponsor should be the Research Center for Group Dynamics. We undertook to get a research grant to make studies in depth of the phenomena we wanted to systematically develop and explore. We decided to call the enterprise The National Training Laboratory for Group Development.
During the winter of 1946-47, as planning went ahead for this experi- mental laboratory. we received a grant enabling research planning to move ahead under the leadership of John French, one of the senior scientists at the Research Center for Group Dynamics. The planning involved an inter- disciplinary research team of about 20 young scientists from Harvard and M.I.T. from the disciplines of clinical. psychology, social psychology, and sociology. The conceptualizing and designing of the cumculum and methods of this new type of action research laboratory have been reported
*Lippitl, Ronald. Training in Cornmuniry Relations. Harper & Brothers. New York. 1949.
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Ronald Lippirr / 7
in detail. There was a vigorous blending of the framework of democratic ethics derived from John Dewey and Eduard Lindeman as interpreted by our co-worker Kenneth Benne, the principles and methods of progressive education, some of the approaches of therapeutic group work we learned from our colleague, Fritz Redl, thc basic methods and philosophy of adult education, the resources of social group work, the basic action research orientation of Kurt Lewin, and our derivations of a theory of "Change- Agentry." This integrative planning process was probably the most "turned--on," concentrated learning experience of my life.
A Ncw Kind of Group Work, or ?
Tragically Kurt Lewin died in the winter of 1947, so he never saw the launching at Bethel, Maine that summer of the actualization of his in- volvement in the planning of the next phase of his conceptualization of the integration of theoretical group dynamics with his concepts of action re- search, and the interdisciplinary contributions to the technology of group development and training for group leadership.
Durin'g those first years of the NTL program at Bethel, participants from all areas of professional human service work and from management con- verged to provide an amazing mix of resources and of motivated leader- ship. The focus on applications to back home settings meant that profes- sionals from clinical practice, education, social work, and personnel work were going back home, often with missionary zeal, to try out the impact of their new concepts and methods. During those early years, one of the participants of the summer program was Dr. Grace Coyle, one of the leaders and pioneers of social work education. She was challenged and stimulated by some of the innovations but quite concerned that amateurs were getting into the group work business after only three weeks of training, without going through the long years of discipline of the basic training in social group work. She wrote critically about these concerns.*
This was a period when Kilpatrick, Hendry, Bowman, Coyle, Newstat- ter and others were actively presenting their differing viewpoints about whether group work method was generic to education, recreation. social work, personnel work, and other fields of human service, or whether it was a more restricted professional discipline within the framework of social work. Grace Coyle was very concerned about the issue of professional
'Cuyte. G. L. "Thc relation of group dynamics to group work." Jourwl of Norional Associurion of Deans of Women, 1949. V . 12. No. 1.
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identification and pushed strongly for a profession of group work as a subpart of the field of social work. She was indeed concerned about all this rampant experimentation with group process going on all over the human service landscape without the benefit of the rigorous training and develop- ment of professional standards and professional identity represented by the group work curriculum within the schools of social work. Some of my social work colleagues were quite concerned when in my Presidential Address in 1949 to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, I suggested that the curriculum for the training of social psycholo- gists should include an opportunity to achieve both identity as a scientist and identity as a professional practitioner with groups.**
But in the last 30 years, the interchange and infiltration between social group work, NTL-generated experiential laboratory methods, and scien- tific group dynamics have been continuous and productive with many exciting mixes of research and practice, and widespread dissemination of concepts and methods throughout the fabric of human service activities in educational systems, industrial systems, social service systems, medical settings, and community settings.
Inregrated Dialogues and Permeable Boundaries
No doubt every one of you who are reading this retrospective summary can think of experiences during the last 10-15 years where you have observed or participated in activities which have involved the integration of methods or tools or concepts generated from group dynamics, from methods and concepts of social group work, and from some of the tech- niques and designs generated by the thrust of the NTL laboratory method. The boundaries between these areas of development and activity have become very permeable; defensiveness and possessiveness have greatly diminished, and many professionals have participated in learning experi- ences in all three areas of knowledge and practice. Here is just a brief sampling of some of my integrative experiences during this period.
-Teaching a course in Group Dynamics in the social group work sequence at a School of Social Work.
-Participating in an interdisciplinary facully task force to develop a doctoral program in social work and social science
**Lippitt, Ronald. Sochl psychology us science and profession. Presidential Address. Society for the Psychalagical Study of Social~Issues. September 5 . 1949.
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-Collaborating with Fritz Red1 of the Group Work Faculty in an NIMH project to study the phenomena of group contagion in a summer camp for disturbed children, our project director being Norman Polansky, trained in social work and taking a doctorate in social psychology.
-Developing an experimental one-way mirror room in the basement of Merrill Palmer School to produce "Contagion phenomena" experimen- tally in collaboration with Fritz Redl and graduate students in social work.
-With Robert Fox, an educator colleague, conducting experimental interventions on changing the position in classroom groups of rejected children, with two students trained in group work as the experimental interveners.
-Conducting a major three-year experiment with delinquent gangs in Chicago, trying the intervention of detached workers in basement rooms, with an interdisciplinary team from group work, social psychology, sociol- ogy, and criminology.
-Collaborating with a colleague trained in community development, Dr. Eva Schindler-Rainman, to work in 80 cities on the development of a model of interagency collaboration and the mobilization of ad hoc small group task forces for community change.
-Conducting laboratories in industrial organizations and government agencies on the development of team work between Black and White managers, and male and female managers in collaboration with colleagues from education and social work, trained in NTL methods.
I think it can be safely said that today the long tradition of practice- developed social group work, the theory and experimentation of Lewinian group dynamics, and the experiential innovations of NTL laboratory educa- tion can be said to have basically blended in exerting a strong influence in all sectors of society and every aspect of group living-social work, reli- gion, industry, public health, psychiatry, nursing, group therapy, and the military establishment. It is difficult sometimes to separate the strands these days bur the roots are clear and differential.
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