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Social Psychology
Published in Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay, Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
Groupthink refers to the desire of people in a group to keep harmony or conformity in the group, creating pressure on its members to put their ideas and beliefs aside and adopt the group decisions and conclusions, regardless of their irrationality and personal inconvenience.
Core values and the practice ideals
Published in Petre Jones, Partnerships in Practice, 2018
Groupthink is a state that any close-knit group of people can get into where their desire to stick together and not rock the boat, overrides their motivation to think clearly and objectively. The group is seen as invulnerable and never wrong, and outsiders are seen with a degree of suspicion. It will be hard to express a view that goes against the ‘party line’ and so there is an illusion of unanimity. Unfortunately, this leads to a lack of debate and a reluctance to seek outside advice. If a practice ends up like this it can be painful to break out, but the danger of groupthink is that it leads to significant underperformance and therefore poorer patient care.
Strategic planning
Published in Noel Austin, Sue Dopson, The Clinical Directorate, 2018
so that the objectives are achieved in the most effective way. The final question must always be to ask yourselves if you have the resources to put these strategies into effect. Sometimes management teams are guilty of group-think and set themselves objectives that they cannot possibly achieve, particularly in the context of continuing to provide patient care. It is better to modify your objectives at the beginning of the year than to have to do so, sometimes very visibly, towards the end of the year when the pressure is on.
Groupthink among health professional teams in patient care: A scoping review
Published in Medical Teacher, 2022
Karissa DiPierro, Hannah Lee, Kevin J. Pain, Steven J. Durning, Justin J. Choi
One example of a potential systematic bias in group decision making is groupthink. Groupthink is a theory that describes when highly cohesive groups exhibit premature consensus seeking (i.e. premature closure on the group level) that leads to poor decision making (Janis 1982; McCauley 1998). Groupthink could occur at all levels of the hierarchy in health organizations, from frontline clinical teams to senior managers and leaders of the organization (Mannion and Thompson 2014). For example, if a medical team member observes that the working diagnosis does not explain all of the patient’s symptoms, but does not mention this concern to the medical team due to the assumption that the group’s thought process and diagnostic decision must be correct, this group would be exhibiting groupthink.
Leadership, Thought Diversity, and the Influence of Groupthink
Published in Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 2019
Michelle Cleary, David Lees, Jan Sayers
Groupthink is a way of thinking that people adopt when they participate in a connected ‘in-group’ whose modus operandi is consensus as opposed to consideration of alternative views or actions (Janis, 1997, p. 237). Groupthink is also referred to as ‘concurrence-seeking tendency’ (Shirey, 2012, p. 67), whereby decision makers seek concurrence instead of making calculated, and considered decisions (Yetiv, 2003). It has been suggested that groupthink arises in cohesive groups, and in circumstances where individual group members automatically revert to applying pressure to maintain harmony within the group when the need for decision-making arises (Janis, 1997). Whilst group members may perceive these actions to reflect group solidarity and like-mindedness, they can be counterproductive (Janis, 1997, p. 237). If the close-knit group adopts a concurrence-seeking tendency when making decisions as opposed to considering other options (Janis, 1997), decisions may not always be the best decisions (Macleod, 2011). As Janis notes, the ‘superglue of solidarity that bonds people together often causes their mental process to get stuck’ (Janis in Shirey, 2012, p. 67).
On the validity of summative entrustment decisions
Published in Medical Teacher, 2021
Claire Touchie, Benjamin Kinnear, Daniel Schumacher, Holly Caretta-Weyer, Stanley J. Hamstra, Danielle Hart, Larry Gruppen, Shelley Ross, Eric Warm, Olle ten Cate
Other evidence to support the scoring inference can and should be generated. For example, it would be important to articulate the rationale for how entrustment decision committee members were chosen to optimize group decisions. Ensuring that the group contains diversity of opinion can foster task-conflict (cognitive differences owing to divergent views of a task) (Dai 2013), mitigate group-think (making decisions that preserve group unanimity at the potential cost of truth) (Janis 1971), and lead to better decisions (Hauer et al. 2016). Not all entrustment decision committee members may weigh assessment data similarly, and subjective impressions are not necessarily void of validity evidence, even if these are not reflected in rating forms or easy to express in words (Oudkerk et al. 2018; ten Cate and Regher 2019; van Enk and ten Cate 2020). Intersubjective judgment combined with portfolio data, supported by training of committee members, as well as front-line clinical teachers, is important to foster a shared understanding of what the assessment data mean (Kinnear et al. 2018). Evidence of having a shared mental model is important to support the scoring inference, even if the opinions differ. Cognitive biases could affect summative decisions (Dickey et al. 2017) and having training or strategies to mitigate these would support the scoring evidence. Summative group decisions can be influenced by social hierarchy (Lorenz et al. 2011), time pressures (Chahine et al. 2017), or information cascades (when an individual makes decisions on the basis of the observations and opinions of others) (Kinnear et al. 2020) that could affect the scoring inference. Having structured group processes for robust information sharing rather than simply ad hoc discussions would be important evidence that these are being mitigated.