| The purpose of this study was to explain the effectiveness of an offsite workshop involving the one hundred top managers of a large multinational enterprise. The workshop created a shift in the participants' pattern of interpersonal engagement from one marked by political and strategic jousting to one marked by trust, openness and unity. The transition facilitated a shift in corporate strategy from a highly diverse to a unified global strategy, and was engineered through group and interpersonal exercises interspersed with informal conversations with the firm's chief executives.; The theory of togethering emerged from a Grounded Theory analysis (Glaser, 1978, 1998; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) of the field notes and video footage of the workshop's facilitators, transcripts of interviews done retrospectively by the author with the participants, and company documents. It explains a transformation in the participants' experience as triggered by shifts in strategic needs, punctuated by two orchestrated interventions, and manifested in three group states. The first intervention involved the disruption of political patterns of engagement (first state) and was accomplished by creating insecurity and anxiety, overexposing participants to each other, taking them out of their natural environment, divesting them of their symbols of status, and having the top leaders engage with them in an unexpectedly informal manner. This lead to a state of confusion (second state), setting the stage for the second intervention, which the participants characterized as getting to know each other. Here they bonded with each other both interpersonally and as a group through a reinforcing cycle of introspection, sharing, and witnessing. Getting to know each other in turn led to a state of communion (third state) in which members felt open towards each other and experienced a sense of collective endeavor. This in turn had reverberations that attended to strategic and structural needs in other parts of the organization, for example, in submit boards, in interpersonal relations within and across subunit, and in the styles of individual leaders.; The thesis extends theories of strategic management (Donald C. Hambrick, 1994), group development (Gersick, 1988; Tuckman, 1965), attachment theory (Fosha, 2000; Fosha & Yeung, 2006), and ritual processes (Turner, 1969). |
