When You Don’t Want Employees to Agree

Most employers think that harmony in the workplace is a good thing, and, in some cases, it certainly can be. However, when it comes to making business decisions, unrelenting accord is precisely what you don’t want.

Most leaders are happy when a group reaches a consensus, but if a group arrives at a major decision without much discussion and with few variations in thought, consider what’s really going on. Did the team agree because their solution was truly the best option, or could one of these other sets of circumstances have occurred?

• Several members of the team never engaged in the discussion process and simply acquiesced to the opinions of one or more dominant group members.
• Some members of the team independently disagree with the group “consensus,” but don’t speak out for fear of being rejected by the group.
• Certain members of the team see problems with the team’s conclusion, but don’t have solutions for the problems and don’t want to appear negative.

All of these situations are variations of what social psychologist Irving Janis labeled “groupthink,” a term used to describe the danger of making faulty decisions because of pressures encountered in a group situation.

In the first situation described above, you may have one or two dominant group members who typically run the show and with whom everyone else is accustomed to agree. Where this is the case, you’re not getting the collective thoughts of a group, but the ideas of just one or two possibly like-minded individuals. What results is unilateral thought and judgment, which is probably not what you were after when you posed a problem to a team.

The second situation described above demonstrates the powerful fear of being singled out or ostracized. While the fear of not being accepted may keep most people following social norms and general rules of politeness, this fear in a business setting may keep obvious concerns and superior ideas from surfacing. Behavior like that exhibited in the second example may be the reason an organization pursues an idea that many people believe to be flawed.