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A research intervention supporting generative leadership made a contribution in the direction of transformative learning when disorienting dilemmas and cognitive conflicts had to be solved.

The manager has great influence over the talks in the workplace. A manager as uses

the appropriate tools can help employees become more democratic in meetings and

more receptive to what colleagues are saying. This in turn leads to increased learning

and better working environment for employees. This is shown in a project with

twenty managers from different businesses. From the public sector participated

county council, state administration and municipal activity. From private industry

participated small service companies, banking, automobile, and an additional

manufacturing industry. The managers had during a year to participate in eight

workshops with different themes related to communication and collaboration,

conducted by researchers from Mälardalen University, Dalarna University and

Stockholm University (Sweden). The employees were requested to answer

questionnaires before and after this year, to study the extent to which they have been

influenced by the fact that managers attended the training.

The results show that the working groups not only become more competent,

employees have also been more attached to their work group and working groups

have also become more involved in decisions regarding their work and workplaces.

Results point at the importance of the manager to support integrated autonomy among

the employees who then become responsible and empowered actors.

The ideal that this project seeks is called integrated autonomy. This means that the

actor at the same time should be both independent and belonging. Employees and

work groups, should as far as possible, be permitted and develop competence to

decide how the work should be carried out. The employees belonging enables the

decision to be made within the framework of the practices, the culture and the

objectives that the group and the organization has developed. Belonging is both a

support to staff and ensures that the action is strongly influenced by the organization.

The manager task is about providing conditions for interaction and to influence the

emergence of collective competence and coordination in tune with a changing

environment. This way of working, we describe as the managers' directing task.

From a complexity perspective, interaction in workgroups is interesting because people create relations when interacting, and these relations create social systems which are emergent, complex and sensitive to initial conditions. This paper focuses communication in workgroups and the application of a previously developed model for observing and analyzing the performance of business teams made by Losada & Heaphy (2004). The aim with this paper is to bring further understanding of how and if this model can be used to understand verbal communication in teams.

The model (ibid) stresses that three bipolar dimensions, advocacy /inquiry, self /other, and most important, positive /negative statements in communication, can be seen as attractors for communication, showing effectiveness in teams.

Communication in 28 workgroup meetings in 13 different organisations have been filmed, observed and analysed. The method and analysis was inspired by the model (ibid). The results show that there were small differences between the teams regarding the dimensions of advocacy /inquiry and self /other, but larger differences concerning positive /negative statements.

The results raise some problems and questions. The characterisation of statements is problematic using the definitions given (ibid). The kind of meeting observed and the behaviour of the leader seem to affect the results. The predicted proportion between the different dimensions in the model (ibid), isn’t reflected in the results. How could these results be understood? Are the identified attractors really the ones predicting effectiveness? Is communication perhaps more complex than predicted by the model?