Power as a Function of Group Integrity: Specialization, the Cost of Belonging, and Transitions Between Developmental and Survival Modes

This preprint proposes a theoretical model of power as a function of maintaining group integrity. Power is considered not only as the capacity to make decisions, use force, distribute resources, or secure obedience, but as a specialized function that translates group tensions into managerial intentions. The central criterion of the model is the cost of group integrity: the expenditures required for a group to maintain working contact with its environment, notice tensions, mobilize resources, act, appropriate experience, and return to the next cycle of action. The article distinguishes between the functional cost of a situation and the additional cost of power. The former is connected with the real complexity of threats, deficits, conflicts, and environmental changes; the latter arises when a group is forced to spend energy bypassing, compensating for, or servicing interruptions of contact stabilized by the organization of power itself. The model introduces the concepts of need, access, the geometry of access, distributed safety, the cost of belonging, internal functional differentiation, and external exchange capacity. It separately analyzes complaint, adverse data, conflict, centralization, developmental and survival modes, the first act of force, autonomization, and dependence on the leader. The work has a theoretical and pre-operational status: it does not offer a validated scale, but formulates testable expectations, a matrix of observable indicators, and a template for analyzing managerial episodes for future empirical development.