Irrationality Galore!

The Psychology of Groups

 The Psychology of Groups

• The problem “one leader – many followers” is acerbated

by the great difficulty to see the others perspective (even
if the employees are speaking with “one tongue”, which
normally is not the case).
• Psychology calls that problem the ‘fallacy of centrality’
(Weick, 1995: 21). The term was coined by Ronald
Westrum: For him the ideal organization should be “able
to make use of information, observations or ideas
wherever they exist within the system, without regard for
the location or the status or the person or group having
such information, observations or ideas” (Westrum 1992:
402).
 The Psychology of Groups

• But this is not the normal way. Hierarchies tend to make their
disproportions visible. In other words, the boss tries to make clear,
he’s the boss.

In Reality systems have more than one center (the manager, as seen
by himself), where unique expertise is stored. Just think of the
person storing all the contracts of an enterprise. If that low paid
employee does not cooperate, perhaps nobody else will find the
original treaty. So, while searching for this document, the centre
clearly switches from the top management to the “small” office clerk,
having the expertise.
• “Systems that fail to coordinate effectively, and systems in which
people assume that things they don’t know about are not material,
tend toward higher error rates”. (Weick 2002: 186)
 The Psychology of Groups

• Jacob Moreno introduced another, more formal

way of detecting the hidden motivators or villains
inside a group. As the already introduced
concept of Luhmann (see chapter I), he also
believed the communicative relations between
people to be more relevant than the people
themselves. So he introduced the group-contact-
test, an instrument to show, how well balanced
the relations inside a team were.
The Psychology of Groups
First Tool: Sociogram

Sociogram – the „Moreno

solution“ for knowing how
your team is working together
 The Psychology of Groups
Second Tool: Semantic differential
• OSGOOD introduced the Polarity Profile
1 2 3 4 5 6

• Caring neglecting
• Modern oldfashioned
• Aggressive calm
• Partners Competitors