We study the infinite-dimensional group of holomorphic diffeomorphisms of certain Stein homogeneous spaces. We show that holomorphic automorphisms can be approximated by generalized shears arising from unipotent subgroups. For the homogeneous spaces this implies the existence of Fatou–Bieberbach domains of the first and second kind, and the failure of the Abhyankar–Moh theorem for holomorphic embeddings.