Group Relations

What is Group Relations?

A method of studying and understanding group dynamics, leadership, authority and organisational behaviour through experiential learning, rather than through abstract theory.

What does Group Relations training cover?

Group relations explores how authority is taken up, the formal and informal roles people assume, and how the boundaries of time, space and task shape a group's work. It is learned through direct experience of group processes as they unfold, not through abstract theory.

Who developed Group Relations?

It emerged from the Tavistock Institute's post-war research into groups and leadership, drawing on Wilfred Bion's work on group behaviour. The method took its recognisable form at the first Leicester Conference in 1957, which has run every year since.

Where is Group Relations used?

Group relations thinking is applied in organisational consultancy, leadership development, coaching and supervision, and in therapeutic contexts, particularly group therapy.

It has influenced organisational development, management and leadership studies, psychotherapy and social psychology.

What is a Group Relations conference?

A temporary institution created for learning. Participants take up roles for a fixed period and study what happens as they do, working through small and large study groups and plenaries, with staff consulting on the process rather than teaching.

The distinctive premise of Group Relations work

Tavistock group relations thinking starts from the premise that much of what drives behaviour in groups — decision-making, conflict, the pull towards certain roles — is not immediately visible. Groups, like individuals, have an unconscious life. Projections, transference and unspoken anxieties all shape how groups function, often more powerfully than any formal structure or stated intention.

'The group relations conference is neither a conventional course nor an isolated psychological laboratory. It is a deliberately structured temporary organisation in which participants study their own experience of membership, leadership, authority, role and task as these unfold.

The conference provides boundaries of time, territory, task and role; within those boundaries it does not prescribe what members must think or how they must behave. It offers instead the possibility of learning from experience.'

Dr Mannie Sher, Tavistock Institute, 2026 (forthcoming paper)

There is a lively and dynamic global community exploring group relations and its application at group relations conferences and within organisations.