Power as a Function of Group Integrity: Specialization, the Cost of Belonging, and the Transition Between Development and Survival

This article proposes a theoretical model of power as a function of group integrity. Power is considered not only as the right to make decisions, a resource of coercion, legitimacy, or an institutional position, but as a mechanism through which a group translates internal tensions and changes in the external environment into managerial action. The central criterion of the model is the cost of preserving a group as a working whole: a competent managerial decision does not increase the cost of maintaining group integrity beyond the real complexity of the situation. To justify this criterion, the article sequentially introduces the concepts of need, access, distributed security, the cost of belonging, specialization, and the additional cost of power. It shows that a group retains its functional meaning as long as it helps participants and subgroups gain access to protection, recognition, resources, the ability to perform a function, belonging, and the future at lower cost than outside the shared order. Special attention is given to complaint as a channel of adverse data; to the distinction between open rules and shadow order; between working and self-sustaining conflict; between functional and shell centralization; to the transition between development and survival; to the first act of force; and to natural dissolution and captured autonomization. On this basis, the article formulates testable implications of the model and a minimal set of observable indicators for analyzing organizations, political structures, professional communities, and intergroup conflicts. The model connects individual processes of need, security, and separation with group processes of complaint, specialization, autonomy, conflict, and institutional regulation.