THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYthe Challenger space-shuttle disaster to the decisions that led to the Iraq
war. Groupthink occurs when team members get hooked on shoring up
a consensus view and no longer consider other perspectives. It’s particu-
larly likely to emerge in groups made up of
like-minded members who lack diversity,
and when the group leader makes their own
position known early on.
An alternative approach to traditional
brainstorming is brainwriting. Group
members write ideas on slips of paper in
silence before passing the slips between each
other, reading others’ ideas and inserting
their own. Ink colour indicates who owns
which ideas, and when a paper slip has four
ideas on it, it is placed in the centre of the
table for all to see. This is repeated up to 25
times. Next, group members withdraw to the
corners of the room and recall as many of the
ideas generated so far as possible – the rationale being that this encourages
attention to the ideas generated. The final stage involves group members
working alone for fifteen minutes in an attempt to generate yet more
ideas. Unlike brainstorming, brainwriting has been shown by business
psychologist Peter Heslin to boost creativity compared with the perform-
ance achieved by the same individuals working on their own.
NEGATIVE BEHAVIOUR
Even with the most effective decision-making systems in place, there’s
always one scourge of the workplace that risks derailing a successful
organization – bullying. Every organization should have a pro-active,
anti-bullying protocol in place. Never mind the obvious harm caused
by being the direct victim of bullying at work, research published
in 2009 by psychologists at the University of Florida showed that
merely witnessing bullying can stunt a person’s creativity, impair
their mental performance and make them less likely to be civil
themselves.
Related to this, in 2007 Kathi Miner-Rubino at Texas A&M University
and Lilia Cortina at the University of Michigan reported evidence that
witnessing misogynism in the workplace is harmful not only to female
staff, but to men too. University employees of both sexes who said they
“Though we are
often taught to
think of ourselves
as inherently selfish,
the longing to act
meaningfully in our
work seems just as
stubborn a part of
our make-up as our
appetite for status or
money.”
Alain De Botton,
The Pleasures and
Sorrows of Work (2009)