  The emergent behavior that arises in many-body systems of increasing size
follows universal laws that become apparent in order-to-disorder transitions.
While this behavior has been traditionally studied for large numbers of
emitters, recent progress allows for the exploration of the few-emitter limit,
where correlations can be measured and connected to microscopic models to gain
further insight into order-to-disorder transitions. We explore this few-body
limit in the driven and damped Tavis--Cummings model, which describes a
collection of atoms interacting with a driven and damped cavity mode. Our
exploration revolves around the dressed states of the atomic ensemble and
field, whose energies are shown to collapse as the driving field is increased
to mark the onset of a dissipative quantum phase transition. The collapse
occurs in stages and is an effect of light-matter correlations that are
overlooked for single atoms and neglected in mean-field models. The
implications of these correlations over the macroscopic observables of the
system are presented. We encounter a shift in the expected transition point and
an increased number of parity-broken states to choose from once the ordered
phase is reached.
