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, apply 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 the situation and the additional cost of power. The former is associated with the real complexity of threats, shortages, conflicts, and environmental changes. The latter arises where a group is forced to spend energy on bypassing, compensating for, or servicing contact interruptions 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. Complaint, adverse data, conflict, centralization, development and survival modes, the first act of force, the autonomization of power, and dependence on a leader are analyzed separately. The work has a theoretical and pre-operational status: it does not propose a validated scale, but formulates testable expectations, a matrix of observable indicators, and a template for analyzing managerial episodes for future empirical development.
Aleksandr Kolomiets (Fri,) studied this question.