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Teams: A Blessing or A Curse?

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Teams: A Blessing or A Curse? * Groupthink: this occurs most often in highly cohesive groups who want to agree with each other. Examples: Bay of Pigs fiasco. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Teams: A Blessing or A Curse?


1
Teams A Blessing or A Curse?
2
The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki)
  • Francis Galton and the poor Ox (1906)
  • Crowd (median estimate) better at estimating
    weight of slaughtered ox than separate estimates
    by a number of cattle experts
  • The elements of a wise crowd
  • Diversity of opinion
  • Independence
  • Decentralization (specialization and local
    knowledge)
  • Aggregation mechanism

3
A Terrible Group Decision
  • Jan. 28 1986 Challenger Disaster
  • Hardware O ring failure
  • Environmental factors
  • Operational demands from multiple users
    (political, commercial, military, international
    and scientific communities)
  • After spending billions to go to moon, Congress
    wanted to see financial self-sufficiency culture
    of conflict, stress, shortcuts.
  • Group Factors
  • Thiokol engineers concerned about O ring failure
    at temps below 53 F
  • NASA asked for a definitive recommendation given
    that this temp. would not be reached for several
    days My God, do you want me to launch next
    April? Lawrence Molloy
  • Thiokol went off line asked chief engineer
    Take off engineering hat and put on management
    hat decision was given to launch

4
Group Decision Making in Shuttle Disaster
  1. Thiokol had data on O ring failures but
    downplayed it as goal was to stay on schedule
  2. Polarization decision to launch met with support
    from group
  3. Thiokol engineers wanted to live up to the norms
    of the group
  4. Thiokol decision to think privately created
    groupthink pressures
  5. Fear of public response if no launch
  6. NASA dominated meetings conflict suppressed
    agreed to cancel but only if Thiokol insisted.

5
Desert Exercise
  • 15 minutes Rank by yourself
  • 30 minutes Decide as a group
  • 15 minutes Discussion as a class

6
Desert Survival Debrief
  • What processes did your team use in coming up
    with the consensus decision?
  • When you changed your ranking, what factors
    caused you to change your ranking?
  • Did you like or resent the group?

7
Zimbardo on Asch Experiment
  • On the power of the group
  • http//www.bing.com/videos/search?qaschexperimen
    tFORMVIRE5viewdetailmid3AB3CB61044FD4F74B2E3
    AB3CB61044FD4F74B2E

8
The Asch Effect
Comparison Lines Card
Standard Line Card
1 2 3
9
Asch and Social Conformity
  • 37 of 50 subjects (74) conformed to the majority
    at least once
  • 14 conformed on more than 6 of 12 trials
  • Several reported actually misperceiving the
    answer after being confronted by the opposing
    majority.
  • The tendency to conform is so strong that
    reasonably intelligent well-meaning people are
    willing to call white black. This raises
    concerns about our ways of education and about
    the values that guide our conduct
  • People conform because
  • - they want to be liked by the group
  • - they assume that the group is better
    informed/wiser than they are.
  • - they see differently

10
Asch Effect What are the implications of the
Asch effect for managers?
  • Strong social effects on what we see and do.
  • How to organize meetings how to create debate.
  • The power of presumed majorities.
  • The power of whistleblowers and nay sayers.
  • How to organize meetings how to create debate.

11
Asch Effect What are the implications of the
Asch effect for managers?
  • Strong social effects on what we see and do.
  • How to organize meeting and debates
  • Find ways of getting people to express their
    views and opinions in ways that prevent those
    views being swayed by perceived group opinions.
  • Emphasize that you are not interested in yes
    men.
  • The importance of people who dont get along with
    others Socrates was turned into an outcast but
    should not have been.
  • Crucially Once one person dissents, the
    likelihood of others speaking up goes up
    dramatically.

12
Zimbardo Prison Experiments
  • http//www.bing.com/videos/search?qStanfordExper
    imentMovieFormVQFRVPviewdetailmid990458EF35
    D97489C51D990458EF35D97489C51D

13
Milgram Obedience to authority (1974)
  • Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and
    without any particular hostility on their part,
    can become agents in a terrible destructive
    process. Moreover, even when the destructive
    effects of their work become patently clear, and
    they are asked to carry out actions incompatible
    with fundamental standards of morality,
    relatively few people have the resources needed
    to resist authority
  • http//www.bing.com/videos/search?qMilgramShock
    ExperimentFormVQFRVPviewdetailmidE49E9EE093C
    EC55FE564E49E9EE093CEC55FE564
  • What percentage of ordinary, law-abiding, Yale
    students would deliver the maximum 450 volt
    shock?
  • lt 10 lt 50 gt 50 gt 60

14
  • "the essence of obedience consists in the fact
    that a person comes to view themselves as the
    instrument for carrying out another person's
    wishes, and they therefore no longer see
    themselves as responsible for their actions. Once
    this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in
    the person, all of the essential features of
    obedience follow"

15
  • People have learned that when experts tell them
    something is all right, it probably is, even if
    it does not seem so. (In fact, it is worth noting
    that in this case the experimenter was indeed
    correct it was all right to continue giving the
    "shocks"  even though most of the subjects did
    not suspect the reason.)
  • Robert Schiller writing about Milgrams
    experiments

16
Milgrams experiments Implications for Managers
Theory of conformism A subject who has neither
the ability nor expertise to make decisions will
leave decision making to the group and its
hierarchy. The group becomes the persons
behavioral model - Dont mistake conformism for
conformation Agentic state theory The essence
of obedience consists in the fact that a person
comes to view himself as the instrument for
carrying out anothers wishes, and therefore no
longer sees himself as responsible for the
action - Im just doing my job
17
Groupthink
  • Groupthink When you feel a high pressure to
    conform and agree and are unwilling to
    realistically view alternatives
  • What are some of the reasons or factors that
    promote groupthink?
  • What can be done to prevent groupthink?

18
Symptoms of Groupthink and Decision Making
Figure 10-6
  • Decision-making Defects
  • Few alternatives
  • No reexamination of preferred alternatives
  • No reexamination of rejected alternatives
  • Rejection of expert opinions
  • Selective bias of new information
  • No contingency plans
  • Symptoms of Groupthink
  • Invulnerability
  • Inherent morality
  • Rationalization
  • Stereotyped views of opposition
  • Self-censorship
  • Illusion of unanimity
  • Peer pressure
  • Mindguards

19
Groupthink Implications for Managers
  • Assign to each member the role of critical
    evaluator this role involves playing Devils
    Advocate by actively voicing doubt and
    objections.
  • Use subgroups and bring in outside experts for
    exploring the same policy decisions.
  • Use different groups with different leaders to
    explore the same question.

20
Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant
  • GE plant in NY, 60 miles from Manhattan
  • Designed to produce 540-820 megawatts
  • Initial estimated cost 65 million
  • Final cost 6billion
  • After 11 years (73-84), never opened!
  • Construction flaws
  • Labor unions
  • Public concerns over safety
  • Escalation of commitment, or failed persistence?

21
Escalation of Commitment The Flip Side of
Persistence
22
Reducing Escalation of Commitment
  • Set minimum targets for performance, and force
    decision makers to compare against these targets
  • Stimulate opposition using devils advocacy
  • Rotate managers through roles
  • Reduce ego-involvement
  • Provide and study more frequent feedback about
    project completion and costs
  • Reduce risk and penalties for failure
  • Make explicit the costs of persistence

23
Simple but Powerful Advice
  • Give views in advance, in private.
  • Pick who will speak first at random (US Supreme
    Court Justices start with junior-most member)
  • Encourage and reward disagreement.

24
Delusional Optimism
  • Due to both cognitive biases and organizational
    pressures
  • - exaggerate own talents downplay luck
  • - self-serving attributions in annual reports
  • - scenario planning tends to reward most
    optimistic appraisals.
  • - anchoring
  • - competitor neglect.
  • - pessimism often interpreted as disloyalty

25
How to Take The Outside View
  • Select a reference class
  • choose a class that is broad enough to be
    statistically meaningful but narrow enough to be
    truly comparable to project at hand-- movies in
    same genres, similar actors
  • Assess the distribution of outcomes
  • Identify the average and extremes in the refer-
    ence-class projects outcomes--the studio
    executives reference-class movies sold 40
    million in tickets on average. But 10 sold less
    than 2 mil- lion and 5 sold more than 120
    million.
  • Predict, intuitively
  • where you fall in the distribution executive
    predicted 95 million
  • Estimate reliability of your prediction
  • correlation between forecast and actual outcome
    expressed as a coefficient ranging from 0 to 1.
  • Correct the intuitive estimate for unreliability
  • less reliable the prediction, more needs to be
    adjusted towards the mean.
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