Groupthink Cmmunication Process

Question: Discuss about the Groupthink Cmmunication Process. Answer: Introduction Groupthink is a concept of psychology, which is a form of flawed decision making in organized groups and in which there exists inadequate critical thinking. Groupthink exists when a need to match is operating (Bnabou 2012). The coin was termed first in 1972 by psychologist Irving Janis. He identified eight symptoms of groupthink: Unnecessary optimism Discounting cautions The belief that the other person has ethical motives The belief that people who are not part of the group are conflict makers A pressure of not wanting to disagree with team members Failure to express different opinions or doubts Assuming that the majority of the opinion is the whole of the opinion Team members who guard the team leader from differing information or dissidents (Houghton 2015) Bay of Pigs and Its Reason of Failure Irving Janis, while forming his theory of groupthink, studied the incident of the United StatesBay of Pigs Invasionof April 1961. After studying this episode, Janis concluded that repeatedly decision makers are blinded by their individual desires of self-esteem from being a part of an important group (Kramer and Dougherty 2013). John F. Kennedys presidency saw three major national security crises, out of which Bay of Pigs was a big failure. The Bay of Pigs crisis was a decision making process that upshot as a negative outcome, failed in achieving the objective and ending the crisis. In 1961 when President Kennedy was elected, Dwight Eisenhower saw that he was being briefed about the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that he initiated. Kennedy was briefed about the Agencys plan long time before he took office, but at that time, he did not raise any objection against it. Even after that, after his taking office, the planning continued (Kennedy et al. 2014). Allen Dulles, the CIA di rector briefed the CIA subcommittee of the HASC on the planned operation activities of the Agency against Fidel Castro organization of the Cuban resistance parties and training of the paramilitary force that would invade the island. Several members of the committee wondered how the 1000 exile-army would stand up against the 200,000 of the Cuban army. Dulles answered that he believes that the exiles would be able to light the fuse that would in turn ignite a general disturbance on the Cuban island (Polk, Kennedy and McNamara 2013). It was nowhere mentioned in the Agency records that other subcommittee members of the Agency were also briefed beforehand. Later on Legislative Counsel Warner told Professor Barrett that CIA subcommittee leaders of the Senate would also have been told. Barrett also mentions that the chairperson of SFRC, Senator Fulbright, was included in the operations by the president himself. Fulbright, on learning about the administrations intentions, wrote a personal letter to President Kennedy in an attempt to persuade him to stop the operation from going forward. In reply, Kennedy asked him to meet at the State Department for personally expressing his misgivings (Polk, Kennedy and McNamara 2013). During the Bay of Pigs incident, President Kennedy was still new and inexperienced in that role and in that situation he was given to handle an awkward situation that he inherited from the previous administration. The existence of the Cuban exiles, who were getting CIA trainings and had been given the assurance that the US would assist them in the Cuban invasion, was a tricky situation to handle. His first mistake was that for the advisory task group he formed he did not provide any direction. In addition to that, he also did not clarify whether the goals were to dispose away the political issues of the overtly enthusiastic and visible Cuban exile army or to achieve any foreign strategic objective vis--vis Cuba (Twombly 2013). The President failed in the perspective of effective leadership because of the following reasons: Failing to communicate with the exile force the expectation that all the members are responsible for the team productivity Failing to recognize and solve the outcomes of the large size of the group and its altering composition with each meeting Failing to identify and solve issues that have resulted because of the heterogeneous attributes of the group, especially the aspect that a portion of the group was in a preferable position with more information in comparison with other team members Failing to point out roles, egg on norms and set levels for encouraging team members so that they can freely express their individual views and face up to assumptions made by others (Rasenberger 2012) Failing to ensure that the team members, other than him, took an in general national standpoint; instead the different parts of the team were allowed to back its individual memo throughout the span of the group. The Kennedy team ignored all the objections put forward by Fulbright, and even Arthur Schlesinger, and moved ahead with belief in the morality of the plan. The team stereotyped Castro and did not bother the question the CIA assumptions about the ineffectiveness of the Castro army and his ability. While studying the incident, Janis claimed that the incident that followed (Cuban Missile Crisis) could have been prevented if the new President and his team had followed the proper methods of group thinking instead of the wrong one (Gioe, Scott and Andrew 2014). Conclusion In the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion, both President Kennedy and the historians poorly judged the result. The outcome was negative no doubt, with regards to the ensuing crisis and the group experience, along with the divisive outcome for the group that demoralized the team members. This flawed decision from President Kennedy and his advisors while authorizing the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba is the case usually employed to demonstrate the event of groupthink. The State departments apparent failure to effectively coordinate the Bay of Pigs crisis response resulted in it being a true example of groupthink failure in history. References Bnabou, R., 2012. Groupthink: Collective delusions in organizations and markets.The Review of Economic Studies, p.rds030. Gioe, D., Scott, L. and Andrew, C., 2014.An International History of the Cuban Missile Crisis: A 50-year Retrospective. Routledge. Houghton, D.P., 2015. Understanding Groupthink: The Case of Operation Market Garden.Parameters,45(3), p.75. Kennedy, J.F., Juan, F.C.J.R.F., Guevara, A.B.C., Ameijeiras, E., San Romn, P. and Oliva, E., 2014. Bay of Pigs Invasion.False Flags, Covert Operations, Propaganda, p.52. Kramer, M.W. and Dougherty, D.S., 2013. Groupthink as communication process, not outcome. Communication Social Change, 1(1), pp.44-62. Polk, A., Kennedy, R. and McNamara, R., 2013. The Bay of Pigs Invasion.Foreign Policy. Rasenberger, J., 2012.The brilliant disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's doomed invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs. Simon and Schuster. Twombly, J., 2013. Presidential Decision Making. InThe Progression of the American Presidency(pp. 125-136). Palgrave Macmillan US.