Groupthink or Deadlock: When Do Leaders Learn from Their Advisors?

Notes

Notes CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1. Yasuo Kuwahara, Decision-making Structures and Processes in Multinationals in Japan (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1985); and Ezra F. Vogel, ed., Modern Japanese Organization and Decision-making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 2. Charles R. Evans and Kenneth L. Dion, “Group Cohesion and Performance: A Meta-Analysis,” Small Group Research 22 (1991), pp. 175–186; Henry Kellerman, Group Cohesion: Theoretical and Clinical Perspectives (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1981); and Stephen J. Zaccaro and Charles A. Lowe, “Cohesiveness and Performance on an Additive Task: Evidence for Multidimensionality ,” Journal of Social Psychology 128 (1988), pp. 547–558. 3. Henk A. M. Wilke and Roel W. Meertens, Group Performance (London: Routledge, 1994); and Alvin Zander, Making Groups Effective (San Francsico: Jossey-Bass, 1994). 4. Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982); rev. ed. of Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). All page references are to the 1982 edition. 5. Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 1, ch. 6. 6. See Gustave Le Bon’s classic study, The Crowd (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896). 169 7. Dean A. Minix, Small Groups and Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982); and Dean G. Pruitt, “Choice Shifts in Group Discussion: An Introductory Review,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 20 (1971), pp. 339–360. 8. See Stephen Krasner, “Are Bureaucracies Important? (Or Allison Wonderland),” Foreign Policy 7 (1971), pp. 159–179. 9. Christian J. Buys recently prompted a humorous exchange among social psychologists by asserting precisely this. See Buys, “Humans Would Do Better Without Groups,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1978), pp. 123–125; Lynn R. Anderson , “Groups Would Do Better Without Humans,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1978), pp. 557–558; David Kravitz et al., “Humans Would Do Better Without Other Humans,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1978), pp. 559–560; Richard Green and Jonathan Mack, “Would Groups Do Better Without Social Psychologists? A Response to Buys,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1978), pp. 561–563; and Leigh Shaffer, “On the Current Confusion of Group-Related Behavior and Collective Behavior: A Reaction to Buys,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1978), pp. 564–567. 10. Classic statements of this argument include Leon Festinger , A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); and Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley, 1958). See also Robert P. Abelson , “Whatever Became of Consistency Theory?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 9 (1983), pp. 37–54. 11. Janis, Crucial Decisions: Leadership in Policymaking and Crisis Management (New York: Free Press, 1989); Janis and Leon Mann, Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1977); Rossall J. Johnson, “Conflict Avoidance Through Acceptable Decisions,” Human Relations 27 (1974), pp. 71–82; and David W. Miller and Martin K. Starr, The Structure of Human Decisions (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 12. It is usually suggested, therefore, that a curvilinear relationship exists between stress or arousal and performance. A moderate amount of anxiety is helpful. Too little arousal causes attention to wander, and too much produces panicky responses that interfere with reasoning and appropriate action. See Richard S. Lazarus, James Deese, and Sonia F. Osler, “The Effects of Psycho170 Notes to Chapter 1 logical Stress upon Performance,” Psychological Bulletin 49 (1952), pp. 293–317; and Herbert A. Simon, “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 30 (1979), pp. 29–39. 13. Margaret S. Clark and Alice M. Isen, “Toward Understanding the Relationship Between Feeling States, Judgments, and Behavior,” in Albert Hastorf and Alice Isen, eds., Cognitive Social Psychology (New York: Elsevier North-Holland, 1982), pp. 73–108. 14. Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, Social Cognition (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 326–333. 15. Important discussions of the way leaders organize advisory staffs include John P. Burke and Fred I. Greenstein, How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989); Alexander George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1980); Margaret G. Hermann and Thomas Preston, “Presidents, Advisers, and Foreign Policy: The Effects of Leadership Style on Executive Arrangements ,” Political Psychology 15 (1994), pp. 75–96; and Richard Tanner Johnson, Managing the White House: An Intimate Study of the Presidency (New York: Harper & Row, 1974...