Are You a Victim of Groupthink?

08/20/2004

Are You a Victim of Groupthink?

"He’s my friend that speaks well of me behind my back." - Thomas Fuller, MD in Gnomologia

Are You a Victim of Groupthink?

In the Exchange publication, Does Your Team Work? Ideas for Bringing Your Staff Together, Marjorie Kostelnik discusses how to avoid the pitfall of groupthink in center planning. She offers this expanation of the challenge...

"Groupthink refers to a mode of reasoning individuals engage in when their desire for consensus becomes so strong that it overrides their ability to assess a problem realistically or to consider a wide range of possible alternative courses of action....When proposals are accepted and acted upon without careful scrutiny of the pros and cons, it is often because groupthink is at work.

"Groupthinkers are preoccupied with preserving a sense of unanimity within the organization. They interpret disagreement as discord and injudiciously strive to avert any conflict which might spoil their cozy feeling of togetherness. Subsequently, group members...refrain from voicing their concerns about actions that seem to be favored by the majority....

"Based on this interpretation, employees feel it is disloyal to disagree....They discount the doubts they experience regarding suggested alternatives as fuzzy thinking....They evaluate opinions which seem to be held by the majority as correct, and those voiced by only one or two members as incorrect. In this way, groupthinkers suppress their objections to a policy and censure their own contributions to the decisions by keeping in line with what they perceive to be the group's desire.

"The danger in groupthink is that the integrity of the decisionmaking process is violated; organizations can blunder pell mell into poorly formulated policies."

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