If we consider a large group of people as a whole, can we say that this group has its own consciousness? For example Congress is a bunch of old dudes with their own consciousnesses, but as a whole it makes decisions by voting and other complex internal interactions between these individual consciousnesses. For an outsider, this organization behaves like a conscious being.

Another way to look at this idea is that consciousness is when we impose a boundary condition on a "medium" made of conscious "particles". I'd even compare humans with a liquid. When it flows freely, it obeys some general fluid laws and its behavior is rather uninteresting. It's when you confine a part of this liquid into some boundaries, the captured liquid starts to demonstrate some interesting effects. Same with humans. When they act freely and barely interact with each other, they form a uniform mess, but once we impose various boundaries, such as countries, companies or various forms of organizations, humans captured in those boundaries are forced to interact with each other more often and those interactions are governed by various laws, and at that moment these fictional entities start to look like conscious beings.