Article,
Better Decisions Through Teamwork
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, (April 2004)Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Abstract
Good managers know that the proverbial "yes man" isn't much of an
asset. But when it comes time to build work teams, many business
managers, either by design or through inattention, staff them with
people who are prone to think alike. In effect, they've built "yes
teams."
As a result, those teams fail to make the best decisions possible?and
the organization suffers.
Recent research by Deborah Gruenfeld of Stanford's Graduate School
of Business suggests that teams encompassing at least two separate
points of view on a particular question make better decisions because
the pressure of the minority forces the majority to think more complexly
and consider diverse evidence. Gruenfeld gained some of her evidence
by analyzing decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Moreover Gruenfeld, associate professor of organizational behavior,
also found that close majorities tend to be more open minded in their
reasoning than majorities holding a larger balance of power. This,
of course, suggests that token diversity of opinion is probably less
effective than true diversity.
She is not the first researcher to look at these issues, but her work
adds to previous knowledge by examining the very complex relationship
between political beliefs and the balance of power within groups.
She also attempts to correlate the nature of decisions?or example,
whether they uphold the status quo or overturn it?with the other
factors.
Gruenfeld has studied the psychology of power for more than eight
years and has published a number of papers, including her Ph.D. dissertation,
on the topic with data garnered from decisions of the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Why the high court? Ä lot of research tends to focus on the specific
personalities of leaders. I was interested in showing that the dynamics
of relationships among people who work together in groups are a stronger
determinant of their behavior than personality. The court is small;
you can get a sense of the alliances and allegiances and factions
in the group," Gruenfeld said in an interview with Stanford Business.
She said it is possible to generalize from research based on behavior
of the Supreme Court to other fields. She has, in fact, found similar
results in studies of student behavior. However, she cautions that
the court is by nature a very conservative institution with a built-in
bias toward upholding the status quo.
Gruenfeld believes her work contradicts a notion popular in some political
circles (and supported by research done by Philip Tetlock of the
Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley,
among others) that those who support parties and politics on the
right are more rigid in their thinking and more intolerant of ambiguity
than those on the left.
When groups in a democracy make decisions, the level of complexity
in their thinking depends more on group dynamics than on personal
ideological preferences, she says. When groups gain power (either
political or organizational), they not only act differently than
when they were a minority or smaller majority, they reason differently.
"Tetlock's finding that liberal opinions were more complex than conservative
opinions was replicated only when the data were drawn from an era
when liberal justices held a majority on the court. When data were
drawn from the more recent, conservatively dominated era, conservative
opinions were more complex than liberal opinions," Gruenfeld wrote.
Her early research on this topic won dissertation prizes from the
Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the American Psychological
Association, and was reprinted in Key Readings in Group Process (Levine
& Moreland, 2001).
Grading the Justices
Gruenfeld's innovative research methods?and the subtleties of the
findings?are well illustrated by Üpending the Status Quo: Cognitive
Complexity in U.S. Supreme Court Justices Who Overturn Legal Precedent,"
published in August 2000 in the Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin and written with Jared Preston.
Data for the study are the verbatim records of published opinions
written by high court justices. The researchers examined the more
than 1,000 decisions handed down by the court between 1953 and 1993,
which have been published online at the Inter-University Consortium
for Political and Social Research.
Using a variety of filters, the researchers pared down the cases to
115 rulings that overturned legal precedent. They then selected 32
cases for which a majority and minority opinion was written?all dealing
with either civil liberties or economic activity. Perhaps the best
known of the cases is the landmark Miranda v. Arizona of 1967, which
by a vote of 5 to 4 redefined the rights of suspects in police custody.
Each opinion was divided into three equal sections for analysis and
scoring. Quotes and simple descriptions were not scored.
The researchers were looking for evidence of both open-mindedness
and complexity in the text.
Evaluative differentiation is the recognition of more than one valid
perspective, while conceptual integration corresponds to recognition
of the trade-offs inherent in different perspectives.
Higher levels of differentiation indicate awareness that there are
reasonable arguments on at least two side of a controversy. "High
integrative complexity corresponds to the acceptance of multiple
worldviews and the experience of value conflict that comes with understanding
the trade-offs among them (e.g., 'Liberal policies protect our right
to equality; conservative policies protect our right to freedom'),"
she explained.
In addition to seeing that majorities reasoned more complexly when
confronted with a minority, Gruenfeld and colleagues also found that
Supreme Court justices in the majority reasoned with even greater
complexity when defending the status quo than when upending it. When
voting to overturn precedent, the decisions were more dogmatic.
One explanation: Majorities making major changes are, in a sense,
more accountable than majorities defending the status quo. And because
they feel more accountable, they may tend to bolster their own positions
defensively, rather than engaging in more complex reasoning. In any
case, said Gruenfeld, these nuances will probably be an area of further
research.
A more recent paper provides a lesson that may be even more useful
to generalize from: Examining similar data drawn from the court,
Gruenfeld and Peter Kim of the Marshall School of Business at the
University of Southern California found that as justices gain power,
become the chief justice, or become part of a larger faction, their
written opinions become less complex. "They exhibit less consideration
of multiple perspectives and less discussion of possible outcomes
(i.e., lower cognitive complexity) in their written opinions," wrote
Gruenfeld and Kim in a recent paper.
Summing up her work, Gruenfeld said, Öur work on the psychology of
power ? not only gives credence to the old adage that power corrupts,
but it explains why this occurs. Whereas the classic perspective
provided by Machiavelli suggests that power's effects are mostly
premeditated and strategic, our research suggests that when power
corrupts, it can be without conscious awareness."
? Bill Snyder
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Helen K. Chang, 650-723-3358, Fax: 650-725-6750
Upending the Status Quo: Cognitive Complexity in U.S. Supreme Court
Justices Who Overturn Legal Precedent
Deborah H. Gruenfeld and Jared Preston
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, (Vol 26) August 2000
Power and Single-Mindedness in U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Gruenfeld,
Deborah, and Peter Kim, forthcoming, 2004
Approach, and Inhibition, Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, Cameron
Andeson, Psychological Review, (vol. 110, Issue 2) April 2003
