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Group Think

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What is Groupthink?

Groupthink occurs when a decision is swayed within a group based on bias or opinions of particular entity or subset. Many decisions in an organization are made not by an individual, but rather by groups of individuals (Sauter, 2010). The goal of groups is to help make decisions within a company based on research, discussions and brainstorming various ideas to come up with the ideal solution based on reasoning. When groupthink occurs, members ignore limitations or impropriety of their analyses as well as possible consequences of their choice process (Sauter, 2010). Decisions become swayed towards the bias despite personal knowledge or feelings and in many cases simply because of an underlying friendship. Hoggs and Haines (1998) wrote that “research has failed to clarify the causal role of group cohesiveness in groupthink because of a failure to distinguish cohesiveness from friendship”.

An example of this occurred recently in a decision support group. The group is made up of various department heads and some of their supervisors. The topic of what departments charge activity should be listed on the weekly flash reports was brought up by the billing director. She noticed that the report was missing a few departments and wanted to get the group to agree that the missing departments needed to be included. The billing supervisor even agreed and was very disappointed that three departments were not included on the report for the past year. As everyone looked around towards the person who designed the report, she reminded them that in fact the billing supervisor gave her a template to base the report off of and even went as far as to show them the email where she asked why three departments were not being captured. In the email, the billing supervisors’ response was that they had never captured those departments. In this scenario, the director

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