People give more weight to their own opinions: Francesca Gino

Interview with associate professor of business administration in negotiation, organizations & markets unit, Harvard Business School

A subjective sense of power can lead to dominance in team discussions, with detrimental effects for performance and learning, Francesca Gino tells Alokananda Chakraborty

Research suggests that half the decisions in organisations fail. From your studies and work-shops, what would you say are the top three reasons why organisation decisions fail?
In my research over the last 10 years, I studied situations in which companies fail to reach the goals they set out to accomplish. As I discuss in Sidetracked, there are three sets of forces that explain how organisations (and their managers) get off track as they implement their plans: forces from within, forces from our relationships with others, and forces from the outside world.

Forces from within include factors that reside in peoples minds and hearts. Examples include peoples inaccurate and overly positive beliefs about their abilities and competence, the emotions caused by events unrelated to the decision at hand, and an overly narrow focus when evaluating information to inform their decisions. Forces from relationships refer to factors that characterise ties and interactions with others. People are social beings, and relationships are beneficial to their well-being. Yet, bonds with others often derail their decisions due to various factors, such as the difficulty of taking the perspective of others, the similarities people share with others, and the comparisons they make between others and themselves. Finally, forces from the outside world refer to situational factors that sidetrack peoples decisions. They include irrelevant information, subtle differences in the way decisions are framed, and the structure of the context in which people operate.

Many decisions we make daily are simple. But some decisions involve assimilating a huge amount of information, exploring many different ideas, and drawing on many strands of experience. Their consequences, too, may be profound for the team and the organisation. Whats your conclusion: when it comes to decision-making, are two heads better than one?
Yes, that would be my conclusion. Managers and organisational leaders rarely make critical decisions in isolation. They typically receive inputs from advisors from both within and outside their organisations. Most people consult others before making a final commitment when facing a decision. Organi-sations, for their part, spend substantial amounts in hiring consultants to provide advice on their complex business problems. Appropriately using advice has been shown to lead to better judgments and decisions. The beneficial effects of advice on the quality and accuracy of decisions occurs even when the people receiving the advice have the same information and knowledge as their advisors.

However, my work in this area suggests that people often give more weight to their own opinions because of the inflated self-views of their abilities. This tendency seems to be worse when people experience a subjective sense of power.

A subjective sense of power refers to the extent to which people feel that they can exert influence over the outcomes and experiences of others. In a series of laboratory experiments, my co-authors and I found that the experience of power leads people to be less open to advice, even when it is from experts. Our results show that high-power individuals are insensitive to an advisors level of expertise they discount equally advice from novices and experts. This is because they feel competitive toward expert advisors, and these competitive feelings lead to enhanced confidence. In team settings, a subjective sense of power can lead to verbal dominance in team discussions, with detrimental effects for team performance and learning.

The saying goes, if you put three people together in a room, youll often get four opinions. What is the best way to utilise team inputs to arrive at a consensus?
A large body of research suggests that most of us think too highly of our skills and abilities. On a wide range of dimensions, from our ability to make good decisions to our success in business, we tend to rate ourselves higher than our colleagues or peers. To take a humorous example, a 1997 US News and World Report survey asked 1,000 Americans a simple question: Who do you think is most likely to get into heaven? Overall, the respondents believed that then president Bill Clinton had a 52 per cent chance of getting into heaven, basketball superstar Michael Jordan had a 65 per cent chance, and Mother Teresa had a 79 per cent chance. Interestingly, respondents rated themselves the highest, with an 87 per cent chance of passing through the pearly gates and, thus, as more divine, overall, than Mother Teresa.

In team interactions, this tendency leads us to focus too much on our own knowledge and point of view and too little on the views and knowledge of others. The best way to consider the view of others is to start by raising our own awareness. By doing so, we can keep our self-views in check and recognise when they may be taking us off track.

When time is of the essence, a good decision is one thats made quickly. Does a leader have the luxury today of deliberating and co-opting the team and getting collective buy-ins? Is there enough time?

Yes, I believe that in most cases there is time to at least seek out the opinion of those who are likely to offer a different point of view. Too often we assume that quick decisions mean high quality decisions, but this is not necessarily the case. Quick decisions are often the results of overconfidence experienced by decision-makers, rather than careful analysis of the data they have available.