Group Thinking and Its Impacts on Cooperatives’ Decision Making

Abstract

“Group Thinking” is the thinking of a group when there is pressure to comply with the group consensus without actual data analysis. This leads to wrong decision making of the cooperatives and causes damage. There are several ways to solve the problem of group thinking, i.e. the consideration of cooperative administrators’ role, promotion of conflict of opinion, experts’ participation, brainstorming to help express and evaluate opinions as well as building up a transparent decision making process. These methods can be applied according to the condition and context of the cooperatives. If the group has established the tradition of opinion promotion and has always provided opportunities to challenge group’s opinion, this would help prevent and solve problems of group thinking, and also enhance the quality of cooperatives’ decision making.