Wednesday, May 09, 2012

PP5506 AOL-Blog 1

ii) It has been said that the desire for cohesion is the enemy of real leadership. Why?


                While conventional wisdom often labels an effective leader as one who is able to unite a group of individuals together and rally everyone towards a common goal, the desire for team cohesion can be as much a foe of real leadership as it is a friend, depending on the context of its pursuit.

                Just like even though drinking milk is generally good for health, taking it when one has a diarrhoea is more harm than help; as shown in the Schachter Study on cohesion, a group with high cohesion but negative norms performs worse than a group with low cohesion but positive norms. In this case, if the leader of the underperforming group still chooses to be pro-cohesion, he/she would be relegated to a powerless position as an improvement on group performance would now rely on breaking the cohesion that breeds the negative work norms.

                Although we may argue that the problem of cohesion only happens in extreme cases of an entire group filled with black sheep, we cannot overlook the fact that there are pitfalls to cohesion even in usual smooth-sailing operations. Inherently, a highly cohesive group is more susceptible to groupthink, which may not always be the best mode of decision-making. A leader would not be able to get the best out of each individual if he/she is perpetually preoccupied with maintaining cohesion. Eventually, innovation is silenced as everyone self-censors and either consciously or unknowingly conforms. While such operandi modus may not appear especially problematic in good times since it enhances efficiency in decision-making, once crisis strikes, sticking to such cohesion-based mentality could very well lead to the downfall of the leader and the group that have long been conditioned and unable to think-out-of-the-box.

                In addition, maintaining cohesion involves keeping everyone in the group happy to a certain extent. However, depending on the size and make-up of the group, a bigger or more heterogeneous group would invariably consist of more varied needs and demands, and trying to keep everyone in such a group happy could be almost mission impossible. Unavoidably, every decision made would result in some winners and some losers, yet certain decisions are necessary for a group to progress or advance. In this instance, if for the fear of disrupting cohesion, a leader chooses not to take certain essential decision, he/she would not have acted in the best interests of the group, which is not befitting of what a leader should be. Worse still, if the inaction of the leader leads to a worsening of the overall situation, his/her good intent of wanting to keep everyone happy could very well end up with making none happy, as the ones who are pro the decision lament at the indecisiveness of their leader and those who are against the decision then but now suffer from the ramifications may just blame their leader for the lack of “knowing-better”. In the end, it could simply be a case of pleasing no one, yet the authority of the leadership suffers a beating.

1 comment:

Gillian Ong said...

I agree with Yiting that leaders who seek cohesion may stumble into many pitfalls and end up in the unenviable position of “pleasing no one” and with his leadership called to question to boot.

Having said that however, there are merits to highly cohesive teams. Research has shown for example, that soldiers need to be highly cohesive and work together as a single unit, especially under tough battle conditions. Cohesive combat units function smoothly and perform well under stress. Like the "central" theme of my other blog posts, I think the question here really is again about how a great leader must understand the pitfalls as well as the advantages of a highly cohesive team, and who is adaptable and knows when the situation calls for him to build up team cohesiveness.

For example, when the team is tasked to do something which is very challenging and has to be pulled off with “military precision”, then it is to the leader’s advantage if his team is cohesive. In another context, for example, when the team has enjoyed repeated success, the leader must understand that this makes the team more cohesive (and on both task and social cohesion fronts I think) – under such circumstances, he should try to look out for the pitfalls of a highly cohesive team and try to steer the team clear from such dangers. In yet another case like what Yiting has described in her post about high cohesion and negative norms, the leader would have no choice but to break up the team to mitigate this issue.

In my view thus, it is not the desire for cohesion which is the enemy of leadership. It is the lack of awareness about when he should build up or tear down a cohesive team, which is the real enemy of leaders.