Decision making and Group think Flashcards
ODDI Proces Model of Group Decision Making – Orientation, discussion, Decision, Implementation
Orientation stage?
- Orientation
* Defining problem, goals
* Planning the process
* Devoloping shared mental model
Orientation inproves performance and time management, minimizes the planning fallacy, and reduces the likelihood the group will confirm Parkinson’s law and his law of triviality.
ODDI Proces Model of Group Decision Making – Orientation, discussion, Decision, Implementation
Discussion Stage?
- Discussion:
* Remembering information
* Exchangeing information
* Processing information
* Detecting inaccurate information
The more information the group has the better the desicion. Discussing is challanging but the most essential step.
ODDI Proces Model of Group Decision Making – Orientation, discussion, Decision, Implementation
Decision stage?
- Decision:
* social decision schemes choice, like voting
Normative model of desicion making = different type of situations call for different type of desicion making methodes.
ODDI Proces Model of Group Decision Making – Orientation, discussion, Decision, Implementation
Implementation stage?
- Implementation
* Carrying out the decision
* Evaluating the decision
- Groups are more likely to accept a decision that is perceived to be a just one, as determined by distributive justice and procedural justice beliefs.
- Coch and French’s (1948) classic study of motivation in the workplace suggests that members are more satisfied and more likely to implement decisions when they were actively involved in the decision-making process (the voice effect).
- Groups frequently fail to accurately appraise the quality of their decisions, and they avoid blame for failure through self serving and group-serving claims of responsibility.
Social decision scheme
= A strategy or rule used in a group to select a single alternative among various alternatives pro posed and discussed during the group’s deliberations, includ ing explicitly acknowledged decision rules (e.g., the group accepts the alternative favored by the majority) and implicit decisional procedures (e.g., the group accepts the alternative favored by the most powerful members).
Parkinson’s Law
A task will expand to fill the time available for its completion
Law of triviality
The amount of time a group spends on discussing any issue will be in inverse proportion to the consequentiality of the issue.
Distributive justice
Procedural justice
Distributive justice = Perceived fairness of the distribution of rights, resources, and costs.
Procedural justice = Perceived fairness and legitimacy of the methods used to make decisions, resolve disputes, and allocate resources; also, injudicial contexts, the use of fair and impartial procedures.
Normative model of decision making
= A theory of decision making and leadership that predicts the effectiveness of group-centered, consultative, and autocratic decisional procedures across a number of group settings (developed by Victor Vroom and his associates).
What problems undermine the effectiveness of decision-making groups? Kerr describe three types of errors, and give examples?
- sins of commission: were not supposed to do
* Belief perseverence
* Sunk cost bias
* Hindsight bias - sins of omission: acts left undone
* Base rate bias
* Fundamental attribution error
* Confirmation bias - sins of imprecision: oversimplifying complex desicions
* Availability hearistic
* Conjunction bias
and research suggests that groups exacerbate these errors.
Common Knowledge effect or the shared information bias
the tendency for groups to spend more time discussing information that all members know and less lime examining information that only a few members know.
How to reduce the common knowledge effect?
Enhanced discussion methods, leadership interventions, and the use of group decision support systems (GDSS) reduce this bias, possibly by reducing normative and information influence pressures
the “Linda problem”
Groups, more so than individuals, fall prey to the confirmation (they seek confirming information and avoid disconfirming information) and conjunction biases (). More diverse groups are less likely to display these biases, as are ones which are rewarded for accuracy.
Group polarization
The tendency for members of a deliberating group to move to a more extreme position with the direction of the shift determined by the majority or average of the members’ predeliberation preferences.
How is group polarization sustained?
Group polarization is sustained by the desire to evaluate one’s own opinions by comparing them to those of others (social comparison theory), by exposure to other members’ pro risk or pro-caution arguments (persuasive arguments theory), and by social identity processes.
Risky shift effect
The tendency for groups to make riskier decisions than individuals.
Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire
A self-report measure of willingness to make risky decisions that asks respondents to read a series of scenarios involving a course of action that may or may not yield financial, interpersonal, or educational benefits and indicate what the odds of success would have to be before they would recommend the course of action.
Why do groups make riskier decisions than individuals?
Group Polarization
Researchers such as Myers and Lamm confirmed risky shift is a specific case of ?
group polarization: a shift in the direction of greater extremity in individuals’ responses (e.g., choices, judgments, and expressions of opinions) when in groups.
Early studies carried out using the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire found that?
group discussions generate a shift in the direction of a more risky alternative (the risky-shift effect).
Kruglanski’s group-centrism theory suggests that?
groups whose members have a high need for cognitive closure are more likely to make poorer decisions.
Group-centrism = A group-level syndrome caused by members’ excessive strivings to maintain and support their group’s unity that results in perturbations in a group’s decision-making capability and intergroup relations.
Group-centrism: The tendency for groups tend to rush to make judgements on the basis of insufficient information, particularly if they face situations that interfere with their capacity to process information – time pressures, severe ambiguity, noise, or fatigue (Kruglanski).
What are the two Alternative models to explain groupthink?
- Group-centrism: The tendency for groups tend to rush to make judgements on the basis of insufficient information, particularly if they face situations that interfere with their capacity to process information – time pressures, severe ambiguity, noise, or fatigue (Kruglanski).
- Ubiquity model: Groups often strive for consensus and in doing so, they tend to limit dissent, denigrate the outgroup, and misjudge their own group’s competence. These tendencies undermine decision making when.
- Failure would threat the group’s social identity
- Norms constrain open communication
- Members lack self-confidence (Baron)
Baron’s ubiquity model suggests that?
many groups display the negative decisional features identified by Janis, but that these factors combined with a shared social identity, restrictive norms, and lack of confidence will trigger groupthink-like decisions.
Groups often strive for consensus and in doing so, they tend to limit dissent, denigrate the outgroup, and misjudge their own group’s competence. These tendencies undermine decision making when.
- Failure would threat the group’s social identity
- Norms constrain open communication
- Members lack self-confidence (Baron)
What are the Benefits of deciding things in a group?
- More people means more information
- More people to do the “work”: check for errors, review information, process ideas
- People more likely to follow through if part of a group that decided
- More people means different perspectives and ways of thinking
- Groups usually have standards for making decisions.
- Others can be blamed if the decision turns out badly
What are the Costs of deciding things in a group?
- Group decision making in difficult and time consuming
- Sometimes the group fails to recognize the wrong things
- Sometimes people don’t work as hard as they should in groups
- Groups can fall prey to groupthink
How to prevent group think?
Kenedy learned from the Bay of Pigs failure, redesigned his advising group, and achieved great success during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Limiting premature seeking of concurrence:
o Open style of leadership
o Devil’s advocate, subgroup discussions
Correcting misperceptions and biases
Using effective decision-making techniques
The Abilene paradox, as described by Harvey (1988), occurs when?
groups mismanage agreement and erroneously assume that their private opinion is discrepant from the other group members’ opinions. Groups also experience entrapment when they become committed too quickly to a decision and continue to invest in it despite high sunk costs.
Abilene paradox = The counter intuitive tendency for a group to decide on a course of action that none of the members of the group individually endorses, resulting from the group’s failure to recognize and manage its agreement on key issues (identified by Jerry Harvey).
Entrapment = A form of escalating investment in which individuals expend more of their resources in pursuing a chosen course of action than seems appropriate or justifiable by external standards.
Sunk cost = An investment or loss of resources that cannot be recouped by current or future actions.
Entrapment
= A form of escalating investment in which individuals expend more of their resources in pursuing a chosen course of action than seems appropriate or justifiable by external standards.
Sunk cost
= An investment or loss of resources that cannot be recouped by current or future actions.
Janis’s theory of grouptink? When does it occur?
Groupthink occurs when group members strive for solidarity and cohesiveness to such an extend that any question or topic that could lead to disputes are avoided.
Group Think Janis three factors combined that cause groupthink?
Cohesiveness
Structural faults of the group or organization
Provocative situational context
Groupthink has multiple symptomes that Janis organized into three categories:
- Overestimation of the group: illusion of invulnerability and illusion of morality.
- Closed-mindedness: rationalizations, stereotypes about the outgroup.
- Pressures toward uniformity: self censorship, the illusion of unanimity, direct pressure on dissenters, and self appointed mindguards.
* Mindguard = A group member who shields the group from negative or controversial information by gatekeeping and suppressing dissent
Cognitive closure
The psychological desire to reach a final decision swiftly and completely; also, the relative strength of this tendency, as indicated by a preference for order, predictability, decisiveness, and closed-mindedness.
Janis noted that groups need not sacrifice cohesiveness to avoid the pitfall of groupthink. He recommended…?
recommended limiting premature seeking of concurrence, correcting misperceptions and errors, and improving the group’s decisional methods.
