Identifying emergent leaders in psychotherapy groups

This paper is the second in the series on group development and emergent leadership. It describes the design of a sociometric instrument which will be used for the identification of the four emerging leaders from the perspective of the group participants themselves. These four leaders, Task, Emotional, Scapegoat and Defiant, perform ongoing maintenance functions in the group and take up the critical function of spokesmen in the group's dialectical processing of phase-specific, group level issues. The goal here is to design an instrument which would allow both clinician and researcher to identify these critical persons early in a group's life.Ariadne P. Back is in private practice in Chicago, Illinois.