This is a case of organizational behavior.What questions might be asked and whic

Question

This is a case of organizational behavior.What questions might be asked and which knowledge points should i handle? Case Study 2- The Dangers of Groupthink Sometimes, the desire to maintain group harmony overrides the importance of making sound decisions. When that occurs, team members are said to engage in groupthink A civilian worker at a large air force base recalls the time that groupthink overcame her team's decision-making ability. She was a member of a process improvement team that an air force wing commander formed to develop a better way to handle the base's mail, which indluded important letters from high ranking military individuals. The team was composed mostly of civilians, and it took almost a month to come up with a plan. The problem: the plan was not a process improvement Recalls the civilian worker, 1 was horrified. What used to be eight steps was now 19. The team had devised a new system that resulted in each piece of mail being read by several middle managers before reaching its intended recipient. The team's new plan slowed the mail down considerably, with an average delay of two weeks. Even though the team members all knew that the new system was worse than its predecessor, no one wanted to question the team's solidarity. The problems lasted for almost an entire year. It wasn't until the wing commander who formed the team complained about the mail that the system was changed During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Virginia Turezyn, managing director of Infinity Capital, states that she was a victim of groupthink. At first, Turezyn was sceptical about the stability of the boom. But, after continually reading about start-ups turning into multimillion-dollar payoffs, she felt different. Turezyn decided to invest millions in several dot-coms, including -Drive, a company that provided electronic data storage. The problem was that I-Drive was giving the storage away for free, and as a result the company was losing money. Turezyn recalls one board meeting at I-Drive where she spoke up, to no avail. "We're spending way too much moneyl she screamed. The younger executives shook their heads and replied that if they charged for storage, they would lose their customers. Says Turezyn, 1 started to think, "Maybe I'm just too old. Maybe I really don't get it." Unfortunately, Turezyn did get it. I-Drive later filed for bankruptcy Steve Blank, an entrepreneur, also fell victim to groupthink. Blank was a dot-com investor, and he participated on advisory boards of several internet start-ups. During meetings for one such start-up, a Web Photo finisher, Blank tried to persuade his fellow board members to change the business model to be more traditional. Recalls Blank, 1 went to those meetings and starting saying things like "Maybe you should spend that $10 million you just raised on acquiring a customer base rather than building a brand." The CEO told me, "Steve, you just don't get it-all the rules have changed." The team didn't take Blank's advice, and Blank says that he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the deal

Explanation / Answer

Groupthink occurs when the pressure to conform within a group interferes with that group's analysis of a problem and causes poor group decision making. Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness.

Knowledge Points:- Four essential questions in a GroupThink process-

1) is the logic correct? (in selecting the preliminary recommendation from among the options);

2) is the judgment correct? (the logic may be fine, but the judgment may be poor);

3) are there any problems or errors remaining in the preliminary recommendation?; and

4) can the preliminary recommendation be improved?

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