Individual Differences and Interpersonal Relationships — Page 238, Lesson 383

I want to walk you through the concept of cohesion first, because it’s the foundation for understanding how a crew works together. Cohesion is defined as the sum of the forces which bind crew members together. In plain language, it’s the total of everything that keeps the team united. It generally goes hand-in-hand with a shared attitude towards problems. That means a cohesive crew tends to see challenges the same way and approach them with a common mindset. Cohesion is based on two things. First, the mutual motivation of the crew towards the job — everyone wants to do the work well. Second, inter-appreciation of the members of the crew one to another — each person values and respects the others. Now, how tightly or loosely knit the links are between group members determines how well each individual accepts the group’s standards and roles. If the group is tightly knit, acceptance is strong; if it’s loose, acceptance may be weaker. Group cohesion is a major advantage in times of difficulty or danger. When things go wrong, crews tend to draw personal strength from their relationships with other crew members. That mutual support can be critical in an emergency. Now let’s move into Group Decision Making. In a multi-crew aircraft, any decision may be improved by consultation among the crew members. It is generally true that the decision reached by a group will be better than the average decision made by individuals within the group. So pooling ideas usually raises the quality above what any one person would produce on their own. However, there’s an important limit: the group decision will seldom improve on the problem-solving ability of the ablest member of the group. In other words, the best person in the group can still outperform the group’s collective decision. From this point of view, there may be valid reasons to increase crew complements — adding more people — to improve the chances of having an able member on board. But the tendency with modern aircraft is to reduce crew members, thereby reducing operating costs. So there’s a trade-off between cost and the potential benefit of having a highly capable individual in the group. Next, I want to introduce the Factors Affecting the Group/Team. A number of factors — and in some cases, disadvantages — will affect the group’s deliberations in reaching a correct solution and agreement on that decision. The factors involved are: Conformity, Compliance, Status and Obedience, Persuasion, Risky Shift, Group Duration, Role/Norm, and Coordination and Cooperation. We’ll go through each one, starting with Conformity. People like to conform, because non-conformity is stress-inducing. To conform with a group is a strategy for minimizing stress, and people do not normally wish to be seen as the ‘odd one out’. Let me describe a classic experiment to illustrate this. A group of subjects are asked to judge the comparative lengths of coloured blocks of wood. Before the experiment, four stooges — people secretly working with the experimenter — are briefed to give the wrong answer. It will be found that the fifth member, the real subject, will often go along with the group against the evidence of his own senses. His response is what he sees as the social expectation — what other people expect of him — rather than giving the correct response. The effect is maximised when the group holding the opposing opinion is just four. That’s the peak pressure point. However, it has been found that if the single subject is provided with a partner — someone else who also gives the correct answer — his conformity dramatically decreases. Having just one ally breaks the pressure. Such conformity is not confined merely to judgements of length. Individuals will accept group opinions and attitudes on many subjects. And readiness to conform appears to differ between races, sexes, and nationalities. So as a pilot, you need to be aware that the pressure to conform can affect decisions in the cockpit, and that this pressure varies among individuals.