The Impact of Belonging Groups in an Institutional Merger Process

This paper discusses challenges in a reorganisation process where the action research process uncovered the attempts of a small group taking care of the organisational containment related to the whole system. A Danish municipal government decided to merge a branch of its public library and a public service centre to optimise community services and extend the use of online services. All affected employees were involved in work groups to discuss the reorganisation and their future tasks. Growing tensions between staff and leaders caused by the failure to establish a trusted framework for the discussions and worker’s disaffection and anxieties about job security were brought to light in the research process. The analysis of the research process is informed by psychodynamic system theory and focuses on individual and group processes, and on the leaders’ roles in the merger process. This leads to further study of the strain experienced by health and safety representatives in their efforts to contain the resultant frustrations. Despite a framework offering the opportunity for dialogue, communication between leaders and employees was at cross purposes and their fixed positions gave rise to projections and dysfunctional mirroring from both sides. This paper discusses such conflict issues in the light of work by W. Bion and L. von Bertalanffy.
Key words: action research, system theory, group processes, belonging groups, negative capability, emotional containment.