The power motive as an influence on group decision making.

Abstract

An experiment was conducted with college students to determine both the influence of the group leader's power motivation and the group's cohesiveness on quality of group decision making. Forty groups of five students came together to discuss a business study case that concerned whether a company should market a new microwave oven. Each member of the group had a different role—company president, manager of production, and so forth—and each had a role sheet specifying items of information available to that person and not to other members of the group. The case was designed to feature most of the characteristics that Janis sees as identifying the kinds of policy decisions that produce groupthink. Need for power was assessed by means of the Thematic Apperception Test measure devised by Winter. Students scoring among the top and bottom quarter of those taking the test were selected as group leaders, and an attempt was made to create group cohesiveness in half the groups by offering a group reward to the group that performed best. Groups whose leaders scored low on n Power brought more factual information from their role sheets into group discussion and also considered more action proposals than did groups headed by leaders who scored high in power motivation. Group cohesiveness was not found to have any effect on the quality of the decision-making process.

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