The Danger of Group Thinking

Workplace violence prevention is too complicated to leave to a committee, unless we can find a better way to prepare its members for the task.

June 01, 2006 — CSO — My "aha" moment about workplace violence committees came from, of all things, a safety manual I read to prepare for some backcountry skiing in the mountains with my family. Like any good risk manager, I don't want to be too casual about the safety of those under my care, so I conducted research into all the possible risks. After a quick internal argument about bear and mountain lion threat-mitigation and how much my .44 would cramp my downhill performance, I turned my attention to the threat of avalanches.

I found a safety manual with the general rules about gauging the risk of avalanche based on the interaction of terrain, weather and snowpack. It described how to spot dangerous conditions and, more importantly, how to put oneself into the right mode to make a risk decision. But, surprisingly, it also had an entire section on the dangers of groups in perceiving and assessing risks. In a review of fatal U.S. avalanche accidents in the 1990s, it was found that terrain, weather and snowpack conditions were generally contributory factors, but human factors were the primary factor. According to research cited in the manual, larger groups of people actually are less sensitive to risk than smaller groups or individuals, and they typically make bad decisions based on group dynamics. There's a natural tendency to share the pain or risk, and groups may act out of human desires.

That was when workplace violence risk evaluation rushed to my mind.

Protecting people is one of those noble job responsibilities that CSOs take very seriously. The basic responsibility to serve and protect our fellow man seems clear, especially when we are protecting our company's employees from dangerous outsiders. But clarity quickly fades when dealing with the distasteful issue of employee-initiated workplace violence. Could it be that this is a risk decision too dangerous and complicated to just hand over to a cross-functional team of employees?

The Team Mind-Set

The conventional wisdom of putting together a cross-functional team to evaluate risky behavior has merit on two main accounts. First, more minds might increase the chances that someone will spot risky behavior. Second, assembling people with points of view that represent everyone in the organization with a role to play makes the action phase easier. If everyone helped make the decision, there is less of a need to sell the decision to anyone.

Those are two attractive reasons, but we must now take group dynamics into account. Let's face it. No one (including the CSO) wants to make a decision that ends someone's career or casts doubts on that person's value to an organization without having a high confidence that he or she is acting for the good of others at the expense of one. It would all be so easy if we could look into crystal balls or even identify a gene that guaranteed an aptitude for violent behavior or the loss of self-control.