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The openness movement that started in the 1940's with the invention of the T-group has lost much of its momentum. The movement's excesses and abuses have discredited openness in its pure form to the point where anything resembling a T-group is verboten in many organizations, and many of its original champions have become disenchanted with it. What of the original form of openness can be or should be salvaged?

The intensive group experience is a setting for the development of the individual through a medium of open and candid exchange made possible by a cohesive group and a nondirective leader. In such a humanistic endeavor it is easy to exaggerate the free dom of expression and to underestimate the forces of social control and the authority of the unprepossessing leader. But open interaction is exquisitely controlled social behav ior, and groups employing it possess an impressive potential for social influence. In fact, these misrepresentations of the power of the activity and the group leader consti tute a kind of mystification by the practitioner of him- or herself and his or her clientele.

The subject of this paper is the open handling of face-to-face human relationships. The term used here is "maintenance-by-expression," meaning that relationships are discussed explicitly among the parties concerned. Despite the popularity of openness (or, stated otherwise, the analysis of group process) for therapeutic and training purposes and despite the interest in applying this approach to organizations, it has not been successfully introduced into entire organizations. The commune studied here is a notable exception. The case study provides an opportunity to consider the organizational conditions evidently necessary for the adoption and perpetuation of expressive maintenance. The paper qlso examines the particular form of expressive maintenance employed at the commune in an attempt to expand understanding of this unconventional social practice.

ABSTRACTSome new directions for research on group effectiveness are proposed. These include: (a) explicit recognition of group interaction process as the moderator of input‐output relationships in groups; (b) research which focuses on the functions of group interaction in influencing group performance; and (c) use of experimental interventions which create new, non‐typical patterns of interpersonal behavior in groups as an approach to studying group effectiveness. The results of two studies based on these proposals are summarized. One study examines the effectiveness of implicit vs. explicit discussion of group task "strategies"; the other addresses the effects of implicit ("traditional") vs. explicit ("adaptive") approaches to the maintenance of internal social relationships in work groups. Implications of the research are drawn both for future research on group effectiveness, and for the design of interventions aimed at improving the performance of on‐going groups in organizations.

This paper has two purposes. First, it conceptualizes the process by which encounter group casualties occur. Primary attention in the literature on encounter group casualties has been trained upon the rate of injury and upon the more or less discrete events which give rise to injury. For example, Lieberman, Yalom, & Miles (1973), the major study thus far, made a rather piecemeal analysis of the causes, listing such discrete factors as attack (by the group or leader), rejection, coercive expectation, and unrealistically high hopes of gain. This paper will attempt a more integrated conception of the etiology of encounter group casualties, with a central explanatory concept being the mismanagement of conflict. The second purpose is to replicate the Lieberman et al. (1973) study of encounter group casualties. Procedure for diagnosing injury was essentially the same, the type of encounter group somewhat different, and the incidence of psychological injury considerably lower.