Develop “groupthink-No-More” guidelines
Develop “Groupthink-No-More” guidelines for teams and complete Option 1 or Option 2 for the second deliverable.
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Introduction
Many organizations aspire to be “innovative environments,” but are plagued with suboptimal outcomes. The executive team may decide to hire a social psychologist to identify the root causes of poor decisions and provide coaching on creative and independent thinking.
To deepen your understanding, you are encouraged to consider the questions below and discuss them with a fellow learner, a work associate, an interested friend, or a member of the business community.
Describe the process of group formation, including why and how groups are formed.
How does cohesion influence groupthink?
Can conflict within a group ever be productive?
Preparation
This assessment has two deliverables. Read the Assessment 4 Context document for information about the subject of this assessment.
- Many organizations and institutions launch initiatives to promote independent, creative, and innovative thinking within management and teams. The reality, however, may fall far short of the ideal. “Groupthink” occurs when group members pressure each other to avoid conflict because the culture values and rewards consensus and penalizes in some way those who dare to disagree or challenge assumptions. Disagreement does not have to be an unpleasant or intimidating experience. Conflict directed toward producing a positive outcome can improve decision-making throughout the workplace.
- Use the Capella library and the Internet to research social psychology theory related to group process, group formation, group cohesion, group belonging, conflict and individual behaviors within groups, and Groupthink and intervention activities that promote effective teams.
- Instructions
Assume the consultant role in the scenario below.
Scenario
The executive director of a large hospital-based mental health center with three private practice-model outpatient offices in three neighboring communities has hired you as an outside consultant to help increase client referrals to these three private practice offices. These private practice outpatient offices are managed by a medical director and staffed with support staff, counseling and clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, psychometrists, social workers, Licensed Master’s level therapists, and specialists in substance abuse treatment. Historically, the referral base has been the hospital staff physicians.
Despite the fact that the private practice offices are all losing money due to low rates of referral and changes in insurance reimbursement, the staff continues to follow the directions of the medical director to make referrals. This medical director insists that the physicians on the hospital’s medical staff need to “step up to the plate” and increase referrals to the outpatient clinics. Referral development meetings continue to focus on this medical-based referral system largely because none of the non-physician staff will present a different perspective to the well-loved medical director.
Groupthink is alive and well in this group.
There are five hospitals within easy driving distance, and another dozen within an hour’s drive, most with their own counseling/therapy offices and experiencing the same decline in referrals. In addition, the neighboring communities have all the normal and expected social services, community and family services, institutions, schools, and religious organizations we expect to see in established communities with a comfortable mix of lower, middle, and upper socioeconomic classes.
Deliverables
For this assessment.
Develop “Groupthink-No-More” guidelines for teams.
Complete either Option 1 or Option 2 for the second deliverable.
Use the professional format of your choice.
Address issues of groupthink as well as ways to expand thinking beyond the narrow, referral-based perspective currently monopolizing this hospital-based system.
Analyze a workplace problem by applying social psychology principles related to group processes.
How does this research affect teams?
Under what conditions does groupthink occur?
Assess the influence of the social context on individual emotions and behavior in group decision-making.
How would you instruct an individual to be more or less conforming, compliant, or obedient given society’s need for some conformity, compliance, and obedience, and humanity’s need to sometimes question authority?
How does personality play a role?
How do people react to conflict?
How do these principles relate to creativity and innovation in a group?
- Integrate social psychology principles and research to develop guidelines for minimizing groupthink.
- How should teams be constructed?
What is the role of conflict?
What cultural shift needs to occur within the organization?
Option 1: Develop one original, research-based individual activity to use in a group training workshop that demonstrates how to maximize independent, creative, and innovative thinking in a group.
Option 2: Propose a research-based team-training program with a minimum of three activities that demonstrate how to maximize independent, creative, and innovative thinking in a group.
The following criteria apply to both Option 1 and Option 2:
Integrate methods and principles of social psychology to develop training that promotes independent, creative, and innovative thinking.
Support guidelines and training with references from scholarly and professional literature.
Context
Groups
A group is defined as two or more individuals who influence one another through social interaction. Groups evolve norms, or shared perceptions, of what constitutes appropriate behavior. Groups also tend to develop expectations and either formal or informal roles about how each individual member of the group should behave. Group members also depend on one another to achieve group goals and therefore influence each other greatly.One important aspect of groups is the amount of cohesiveness they display. Cohesiveness is the strength of the relationship that links members of the group to one another. Many researchers (including Carless & DePaola, 2000; Dion, 2001) have looked at factors related to group cohesiveness.Understanding Organizations Using Social Psychology
It is useful to identify how educational programs and other organizations are studied and understood. One aspect of this process is the theory of planned behavior. You may be surprised to find out that attitudes do not always predict behavior. LaPiere (1934) was the first to document that, often, attitudes and behaviors do not match. Since that time, many researchers (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977; Ajzen, 1991) have looked at factors that determine whether attitudes will be predictive of behavior.A systemic methodology based on sociocultural analysis of change using sociocultural tools is cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1987). Activity theory identifies the impact of mediational tools to a system undergoing change (Vygotsky, 1978). These tools can be both technical, such as a computer, and psychological, such as dialog. Both types of tools provide an immediate link between human activity and an external object. Wertsch (1998) maintained that a fundamental claim of sociocultural learning theory is the focus on human action mediated by cultural tools within the cultural, institutional, and historical context in which that action occurs. Cultural tools are “both material and symbolic; they regulate interaction with one’s environment and oneself” (Cole & Engeström, 1993, p. 9). This methodology is used to understand, from a sociocultural perspective, the integration of technologies into varied settings.This perspective has the potential to define the interactions in an organization based on the changes in the social dynamic through the integration of new tools, as well as providing a reasoned evaluation of the potential for change in varied settings (Russell, 2008).There are several theories concerning the interpersonal and individual dynamics of understanding organizations. As a result of reviewing these studies and related concepts, one might develop new awareness of one’s role in developing findings from observations of a social dynamic; for example, how does understanding fundamental attribution error reduce the potential of an error in an analysis of data and the definition of findings?References
Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1977). Attitude-behavior relations: A theoretical analysis and review of empirical research. Psychological Bulletin, 84, 888-918.Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179-211.Carless, S. A., & DePaola, C. (2000). The measurement of cohesion in work teams. Small Group Research, 31(1), 71-88.Cole, M., & Engeström, Y. (1993). A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognition: Psychological and educational considerations. Cambridge University Press.Dion, K. L. (2001). Group cohesion: From “field of forces” to multidimensional construct. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice, 5(1), 7-26.Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Orienta-Konsultit Oy.LaPiere, R. T. (1934). Attitudes vs. action. Social Forces, 13, 230-237.Russell, D. (2008). The mediated action of educational reform: An inquiry into collaborative online professional development. In C. Ramesh, C. Sharma, & S. Mishra (Eds.), Cases on global e-learning practices: Successes and pitfalls (pp. 108-122). IDEA Group.Skiba, D. J. (2010). Back to school: What’s in your students’ backpacks? Nursing Education Perspectives, 31(5), 318-320.Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. Oxford University Press.
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