Communities of Commitment: Leadership, Learning Spirals, Teamwork and Emotional Regimes on an MBA, 1997-1999

This thesis reports and discusses my research on the action-learning project undertaken by MBA students with respect to actively embodied team learning. The teams undertook a number of consultancy projects for local companies during 1997-1999. It was seen that the successful teams evolved into micro learning organisations through a staged process of transformation. These stages--based upon models of group and individual development--were related to each other as entwining, attractor spirals that complemented, responded to, and extended upon, each other. Each team was seen to operate within a set of four main emotional regimes. In each of these regimes they responded in unique and complex ways. Their team response varied according to the emergent, meta-patterns of the objectified, collective 'personalities'. The latter were formed in the streams of conversational interaction and contingent binary relationship attractors they exhibited. These complex responsive systems are exemplified in the author's observations and corroborated in the individual and collective reflections of members of teams and their hosts' comments in interviews concerning the teams' fulfilment of their project obligations. Key findings are that the teams investigated fell into four main emotional regimes. These were later named as 'Acephalous Pairs', 'Suspicious Mercenaries', 'Trusty Followers' and 'Responsible Professionals'. The dialectics of interaction at individual and group level generated meta-patterns in the enactment of each team's story, revealing features of the emergent, corporate 'personality' reproduced in each of the teams. Within the quadrant of any particular emotional regime, the corporate personality mediated teams' expression of these regimes; giving them an individual 'flavour'. Measures of the team 'personalities' were determined using the observed percentages shown by each team for each of the set of factors I believed represented those of the 'Socioanalytic' method (Hogan, 2001). A matrix was developed with which to examine the teams along the key dimensions. It was also determined that a movement across a conceptual continuum from metaphor to metonymy was demonstrated in the embodied structuration of the observed teams during the course of their projects. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]