Threat, cohesion, and group effectiveness: Testing a social identity maintenance perspective on groupthink.

Abstract

Although Janis's concept of groupthink is influential, experimental investigations have provided only weak support for the theory. Experiment 1 produced the poor decision quality associated with groupthink by manipulating group cohesion (using group labels) and threat to group members' self-esteem. Self-reports of some groupthink and defective decision-making symptoms were independently, but not interactively, affected by cohesion and threat. Experiment 2 confirmed the success of the cohesion manipulation. Experiment 3 replicated the poor-quality decision making observed in Experiment 1 and provided support for a social identity maintenance perspective on groupthink: Groups who operated under groupthink conditions but who were given an excuse for potential poor performance produced significantly higher quality decisions than groups who worked under groupthink conditions alone. The results are used to interpret the groupthink phenomenon as a collective effort directed at warding off potentially negative views of the group.

Birds of a feather: Leader-follower similarity and procedural fairness effects on cooperation

“…At the group level, similarity also fosters group cohesion (e.g. Callaway & Esser, 1984;Callaway, Marriott & Esser, 1985;Turner, Pratkanis, Probasco, & Leve, 1992), and similarity "at work"-the congruence between people and their work environment-is associated with various positive organizational outcomes (for overviews, see Edwards et al, 2006;Hoffman & Woehr, 2006;Kristof-Brown et al, 2005). While similarity has important consequences for a wide range of outcomes, its role in leadership effectiveness has received relatively limited attention.…”

Influence of Cognitive Biases in Distorting Decision Making and Leading to Critical Unfavorable Incidents

“…Specifically, the factors that contributed to this irrational behavior include direct pressure on dissenters (group members are under social pressure to not oppose the group consensus), self-censorship (doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not accepted) and the illusion of unanimity. Turner et al [20,21] also showed that groupthink is most likely to occur when a group experiences antecedent conditions, such as high cohesion, insulation from experts and limited methodological search and appraisal procedures, and leads to symptoms, such as the illusion of invulnerability, the belief in the inherent morality of the group, pressure on dissenters, self-censorship and the illusion of unanimity. More concretely, the symptoms of groupthink, i.e., (1) incomplete analysis of the alternatives, (2) incomplete analysis of the objectives and (3) failure to examine the risks of the preferred choice, were observed during the occurrence of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.…”

A Social Identity Theory of Leadership

“…Rather than basing leadership on leader schemas that generally contain optimal situation and task-specific leadership prescriptions, a situation can exist where there is a powerful leader who embodies a group prototype that does not prescribe optimal decision-making procedures. This may produce groupthink (Janis, 1972); powerful leaders and the absence of norms for optimal decision making conspire in highly cohesive groups to produce suboptimal decision-making procedures that lead to poor decisions M. E. Turner, Pratkanis, Probasco, & Leve, 1992).…”