Organizations are a collection of groups and groups are a collection of people, but have you ever thought what are the forces that hold organizations and groups? Are they the same? Do they compete with each other? Those are all interesting questions that can help us better understand organizational dynamics.
We believe that there are three main forces that keep organizations and groups. Those forces are the same basic forces that hold earth and living entity on earth. We are talking about gravity, electromagnetic and the standard model strong force (https://www.britannica.com/science/strong-force).Â
Let’s start with organizations. An organization holds groups together because of gravity. Each organization has mass (the easiest way to measure it is by the amount of many and net profit the organization accumulate over the years translated to gold). This amount distributed to each group yearly, which set the group mass. Organizational mass is always bigger than its group and therefore the groups are orbiting around or pull to the center of the organization. Preferably the center of the organization is a vision or a purpose that attracts and gives direction.Â
On the team side, there are forces equivalent to electromagnetics and strong force that keeps all the people as one group. Those forces are combinations of attraction and repel between different personalities and leadership. What is important that those forces should be stronger at the team level than the gravity of the company? Otherwise, the gravity of the company will tear groups apart. On the other hand, if those forces will exceed the team boundaries, they will negatively impact the gravitation of the company. I’m sure that you saw what happened when those forces are losing balance.
Since organizations are man-made, people need to keep track of all of those forces and their balance, otherwise, an instability of groups and organization will harm the organization’s performance.