Too much cohesion a bad thing?

Finding harmony in a group allows a group to gather unity for their "charge". But when it goes too far and groups begin to feel like that have drank from the fountain of youth issues begin to arise.

Jin Nam Choi of the University of Michigan and Myung Un Kim of the Seoul national University reported a study on organizational applications of group think and the limitations to different organizations.



Groupthink was described in Choi and Kim's article as an agreement-seeking tendency that hinders the ability for effecting decision-making skills leading to a complete failure of this group. Groupthinkers are said to suffer from two symptoms. The first related to positive team performance, the other dealt with how little negative performance affected the group.

Throughout the study they visualized, behavior functions they used involved two different forms of group activities: internal and external. The internal activities lead towards team building and greater communication between the group. The external activities were directed at the environment of the group to manage how they interacted with each other. Their goals were to assess groupthink and defecting decision making in an organizational setting. The other aspect of their study focused on how groups think and what they do that starts to snowball to the groupthink setting.



The gist of the study suggests that groupthink is bad. And should not be apart of small groups and organizations. But how do we remove group think?







Tune in next time to find out how to remove group think from your organization!

Citiation:

Choi, Jin, and Myung Kim. "The Organizational Application of Groupthink and Its Limitations in Organizations." Journal of Applied Psychology. 84.2 (1999): 297-306. Print.