Recasting Janis's Groupthink Model: The Key Role of Collective Efficacy in Decision Fiascoes

When Does Group Efficacy Deteriorate Group Performance? Implications of Group Competency

While the social cognitive theory suggests that a group’s efficacy belief enhances its performance, emerging evidence indicates that this relationship is more complex than it appears to be. This study explores the boundary conditions of this relationship using the data of 389 employees from 41 work groups in a manufacturing company in South Korea. The results show that group efficacy is positively related to group performance and that this relationship is stronger when members are generally incompetent than competent. We also found that a bottleneck, which is operationalized as a group’s minimum competency, in an efficacious group is at least one condition that forms a negative relationship between group efficacy and its performance.

Confidence Is Key: Collective Efficacy, Team Processes, and Team Effectiveness

We investigated collective efficacy as a key predictor of team effectiveness (i.e., satisfaction and performance) and examined three behavioral team process dimensions (i.e., transition, action, and interpersonal processes) as novel mediators. Based on survey data from 160 project teams, we found a positive linear relation between collective efficacy and team effectiveness. In addition, we found that a higher frequency of action and interpersonal processes partially explains the positive benefits of collective efficacy on team effectiveness. Our study has unique practical and theoretical implications as it provides empirical evidence for distinct mechanisms of the collective efficacy-team effectiveness relation.

The English Version of the Health Profession Communication Collective Efficacy Scale (HPCCE Scale) by Capone and Petrillo, 2012

Communication is a crucial component in all steps of the health care process. Therefore, it is important to have knowledge about the communication skills of the whole health organization. From the socio-cognitive perspective, collective efficacy beliefs are the main indicators of the capacity of functioning of the system. This work aimed to contribute to the validation of the English version of Health Profession Communication Collective Efficacy Scale (HPCCE scale) a self-report questionnaire measuring hospital doctors' beliefs to succeed as a group to meet the needs of internal and external communication and of communication with patients, examining the structure, reliability and convergent validity. This study was a cross-sectional investigation conducted using snowball sampling. The participants were 287 doctors working at different hospitals in UK. Explorative factor analyses and Rasch analysis confirmed the one-factor solution. Results revealed high internal reliability. The HPCCE scale correlated positively with Social Self-Efficacy. The English version of HPCCE is a valid instrument to measure communication efficacy beliefs in hospital, involving different type of doctors. It can contribute to the implementation and evaluation of management interventions in a health organization aimed at its optimization.

Reframe policymaking dysfunction through bipartisan-inclusion leadership

Persistent policy failures have been examined in recent years with a focus on the role of political systems. We evaluate the growth of dysfunctional policymaking in the U.S. and propose a countering approach. Policy failures often reflect partisan policy stalemate, errors or unintended consequences, polarized extremism or imbalance, or partisan reversals with changes in power. Extremes in partisanship are not new historically, but growing policy failures due to negative partisanship have now severely damaged public trust. More "party blind" conditions in policy formulation may be able to renew a more productive social contract. We propose a disruptive presidential leadership approach of bipartisan inclusion to seek to reframe the partisan divides, counter negative partisanship and extremes, re-establish better policymaking interactions, and improve governance and policy outcomes. Dysfunctional policymaking has been attributed to Republicans and Democrats in a Prisoner's Dilemma. Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas often lead to higher rates of cooperation, and similarly, historical policymaking included greater cooperation, but in recent decades the bipartisan norms of governance have substantially eroded. We describe three complementary explanations, which suggest that non-cooperative partisan policymaking has become self-reinforcing, and institutional changes to promote cooperation should focus on lowering the risk-adjusted cost-benefit ratio, making cooperation safer and more attractive for policymakers.

Opening up the Black Box of Group Decision-Making on Solar Energy: The Case of Strata Buildings in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

The adoption of solar energy is lagging behind in urban areas worldwide. Although the literature on energy transition is abundant, it has been focused mostly at the systems level. Few studies have addressed on-the-ground implementation. This paper examines a specific but prominent example of such on-the-ground practice: decision-making processes in strata buildings whose owners are organized in a (home) owners’ association. These buildings constitute a significant proportion of the housing stock in European cities, and hence their role in energy transition cannot be underestimated. In strata buildings, homeowners have to reach an agreement before renewable energy measures can be implemented. These related group decision-making processes are still a black box, however. We constructed a tentative framework based on a review of group decision-making and applied literature, which we validated and refined using a survey and in-depth interviews with (home) owners’ associations in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Our study aimed to explore what the stimuli and barriers for the adoption of renewable energy measures in group settings are. Our empirical findings suggest that leadership and information processing are key factors that explain the outcomes of group decision-making processes. Whereas many are convinced that energy transitions are technically possible, their day-to-day implementation has proven to be complicated. For energy transitions to succeed, the recognition of key factors that explain the outcomes of group decision-making needs to be taken into account.

Groupthink, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Disaster

The article has two primary objectives: first, to elucidate why qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) stands out as a superior method for the study of groupthink, and second, to demonstrate the extent to which the Chinese leadership in 1989 fell prey to groupthink, resulting in ineffective decision-making that caused nationwide upheaval. While evidencing the causal connection between groupthink and the leadership group’s ineffective crisis management, the study nevertheless confirms the growing consensus that the groupthink model is over-specified. Accordingly, the article offers a revised model as a way to improve the groupthink theoretic constructs.

Beyond Separate Emergence: A Systems View of Team Learning Climate

In this paper, we consider how the four key team emergent states for team learning identified by Bell et al. (2012), namely psychological safety, goal orientation, cohesion, and efficacy, operate as a system that produces the team's learning climate (TLC). Using the language of systems dynamics, we conceptualize TLC as a stock that rises and falls as a joint function of the psychological safety, goal orientation, cohesion, and efficacy that exists in the team. The systems approach highlights aspects of TLC management that are traditionally overlooked, such as the simultaneous influence of and feedback between the four team emergent states and the inertia that TLC can have as a result. The management of TLC becomes an issue of controlling the system rather than each state as an independent force, especially because changing one part of the system will also affect other parts in sometimes unintended and undesirable ways. Thus the value is to offer a systems view on the leadership function of team monitoring with regards to team emergent states, which we term team state monitoring. This view offers promising avenues for future research as well as practical wisdom. It can help leaders remember that TLC represents an equilibrium that needs balance, in addition to pointing to the various ways in which they can influence such equilibrium.

Small group processes relevant to data monitoring committees in controlled clinical trials: an overview of reviews

Background The quality of the decisions reached by data monitoring committees (DMCs) is crucial. The aim of this paper is to identify factors that may make errors more or less likely in small, task-oriented, decision-making expert groups and to consider the implications of these factors for data monitoring committees.

Methods A systematic overview was carried out of reviews of empirical studies of small group processes and decision errors in small, task-oriented decision-making groups in laboratory or real-world settings, published between 1950 and 2002 (n = 57 included reviews).

Results These reviews suggest that a number of factors may increase the likelihood that small groups will make poor and potentially erroneous decisions. The most important of these, in terms of empirical support, are: biased or overly directive leadership, expression of a limited range of opinions during group discussion, poor procedures for identifying or appraising the available information, and presentation of the available information in a way that is likely to result in biased perception of it.

Conclusions The main implications for DMCs relate to membership, the role of the chairperson, the information provided for DMCs and training for DMC members. Selection methods that encourage a degree of diversity within the DMC are recommended. Chairs of DMCs should be experienced members, who have the skills to facilitate a discussion, can manage conflict effectively and can be impartial. Adherence to a prespecified analysis plan is recommended to reduce the risk of error associated with strong evidence or excess information. Training in the use of methodical decision-making procedures, education about the factors that influence decision quality and an opportunity to participate in mock DMC discussions may be of benefit for new members.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The authors examined team demographic diversity, perceived team efficacy, intrateam conflict, and perceived team performance as predictors of members' intentions to remain in their team, a form of behavioral commitment. Eighty-three second-year MBA students randomly assigned to 28 three-person teams participated in a negotiation simulation. As hypothesized, results from HLM analysis showed team relationship conflict but not task conflict mediated the relationship of age and national diversity with members' intent to remain. Individual members' initial perceptions of their team's negotiation efficacy and negotiation performance were also found to predict their intent to remain as a team member, but team performance did not mediate the team efficacy-intent-to-remain relationship. Hypotheses predicting that team relationship conflict moderates the relationship of team efficacy with intent to remain and team performance were not supported.

Status, Faction Sizes, and Social Influence: Testing the Theoretical Mechanism

With two experiments the authors test and find support for the argument that in small, collectively oriented task groups, status affects social influence the most when the distribution of opinions reduces the least uncertainty. Moreover, they demonstrate that people use the distribution of both status and opinions to reduce uncertainty about the task on which they are working and that this, in turn, promotes social influence. Experiment 1 illustrates that, regardless of the group's sex composition, basis for status differentiation, or size of the group, uncertainty reduction mediates a significant share of the effect of status and opinions on social influence. Experiment 2 confirms that the effect of the distribution of both status and opinions on social influence is weaker as the task becomes more certain. These findings inform discussion about how status affects certainty in task groups and what this potentially means for organizational settings and sociological theory more generally.

Team Learning in a Multinational Military Staff Exercise

International operations have become one of the main tasks for the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF). The SAF and Swedish National Defence College organize annual international staff exercises with the purpose of training officers to carry out effective staff work. This study analyzed a staff exercise using Edmondson’s team learning model in a military setting. The model was developed by including group cohesion. As defensive routines are a threat to team learning behavior, the possible presence of these was examined. The results indicate that team leader coaching is crucial to support all the variables in the model. The added variable of group cohesion contributed with insights on how the commander used task solving to create group cohesion. Some examples of defensive routines were also revealed but there seemed to be challenges in identifying such routines in this type of exercise setting.

Methods for Counteracting Groupthink Risk

This paper examines methods for counteracting groupthink defined as the extreme concurrence seeking exhibited by decision making groups, typically under conditions of high threat and cohesion (Janis, 1982). The authors identify three major categories of interventions potentially capable of mitigating groupthink tendencies: a) traditional recommendations originally hypothesized by Janis, b) methods for enhancing intellectual conflict during the decision making phase, and c) procedures designed to minimize pressures for the activation of group social identity defenses. The authors critically review the limited research empirically examining these recommendations, identify both advantages and disadvantages associated with implementing these interventions, and discuss conditions under which they are likely to be effective and ineffective.

THE ADOPTION AND REJECTION PATTERNS OF PRACTITIONER-DEVELOPED TECHNOLOGIES: A REVIEW, A MODEL AND A RESEARCH AGENDA

While many of the factors which help explain the rate and scale of innovative technology adoption have been identified, one important variable (the influence of insider, practitioner-developed versus commercial, externally-developed technology) has been under-explored. Focusing on healthcare in particular, the purpose of this paper is to explore the insider-innovator/user dynamic. Relevant literature is used to draw-out and examine the prima facie reasons why insider innovator status might enhance, or conversely impede, widespread adoption. From the literature, a model depicting adoption activity pathways and adoption processes is developed. The paper concludes with a research agenda for future empirical study.

Interpersonal impact messages associated with different forms of achievement motivation

Two studies evaluated relations between different forms of achievement motivation and transactional interpersonal impact messages during a dyadic puzzle-solving task. In Study 1,400 college students received no formal competence feedback during the task. In Study 2, competence feedback was manipulated for 600 college students and used to create high-, low-, and mixed-status dyads. Expectancies of success had robust actor and partner effects on submission in both studies. Competence valuation was linked with communal partner effects in Study 1 and a generalized interpersonal sensitivity in Study 2. When competence was ambiguous, approach and avoidance achievement motives exhibited affectively driven actor and partner effects consistent with their roots in pride and shame, respectively; however, when competence was established formally, motives had more cognitively driven effects on person perception and behavior (e.g., rejection sensitivity). Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of the achievement motivation system for organizing interpersonal impact messages during competence pursuits.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Aristotle proposed that to achieve happiness and success, people should cultivate virtues at mean or intermediate levels between deficiencies and excesses. In stark contrast to this assertion that virtues have costs at high levels, a wealth of psychological research has focused on demonstrating the well-being and performance benefits of positive traits, states, and experiences. This focus has obscured the prevalence and importance of nonmonotonic inverted-U-shaped effects, whereby positive phenomena reach inflection points at which their effects turn negative. We trace the evidence for nonmonotonic effects in psychology and provide recommendations for conceptual and empirical progress. We conclude that for psychology in general and positive psychology in particular, Aristotle’s idea of the mean may serve as a useful guide for developing both a descriptive and a prescriptive account of happiness and success.

Group performance and decision making

Theory and research on small group performance and decision making is reviewed. Recent trends in group performance research have found that process gains as well as losses are possible, and both are frequently explained by situational and procedural contexts that differentially affect motivation and resource coordination. Research has continued on classic topics (e.g., brainstorming, group goal setting, stress, and group performance) and relatively new areas (e.g., collective induction). Group decision making research has focused on preference combination for continuous response distributions and group information processing. New approaches (e.g., group-level signal detection) and traditional topics (e.g., groupthink) are discussed. New directions, such as nonlinear dynamic systems, evolutionary adaptation, and technological advances, should keep small group research vigorous well into the future.

A Social Identity Maintenance Model of Groupthink

We present a social identity maintenance model of groupthink that (a) defines groupthink as a collective attempt to maintain a positive image of the group, (b) identifies conditions under which this form of concurrence seeking is likely to occur, (c) parsimoniously explains the equivocal empirical findings on groupthink, and (d) specifies intervention tactics that can mitigate the detrimental consequences of groupthink for group decision outcomes. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Developing Consensus about Groupthink after All These Years

The groupthink model is evaluated in the context of the papers of this special issue. The major focus is on the basis for its impact and its scientific status. The groupthink perspective is seen as consistent with some other contributions to the groups literature. Interesting parallels between the groupthink and the brainstorming literature are noted. It is concluded that many of the issues raised by the groupthink model are worthy of further examination in a broad-based study of group decision processes. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research: Lessons from the Evaluation of a Theory

In this paper, we examine the historical development of the groupthink model and discuss recent responses to the body of empirical evidence amassed on the model. We conclude by articulating general lessons implied by the evolution of research on the groupthink model. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Groupthink, Bay of Pigs, and Watergate Reconsidered

Irving Janis's concept of groupthink can be seen in the context of our on-again-off-again love affair with groups. Group decisions have often been seen as offering the benefits of collective wisdom, but may also lead to disastrous consequences. Groupthink then focuses on the negative effects of erroneous group decisions. Two major examples of groupthink are reexamined and compared: the disastrous Bay of Pigs decision by the elite advisory group of President Kennedy, and the advisory groups of President Nixon, which led to the Watergate disaster and at unsuccessful attempts to cover up. In both, it is suggested there was a "runaway norm," escalation and polarization with the norm being to exceed other members of the group in taking more extreme and unrestrained actions against an "enemy." While Janis seems to suggest that groupthink will ultimately lead the group to fail in its ultimate endeavors, we need to consider the frightening possibility that in the case of the Nixon group, the group actions came close to being successful. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.