A Study On Impacts Of Leadership Styles On Groupthink In Emergency Decision-making: Using Team Emotion As The Intervening Variable

Emergency decision-making is the core part of the emergency management.It plays an important role in avoiding the secondary and derivative disasters.Under the influence of traditional culture according to which the low-ranking members will follow leader’s will under the most conditions,and affected by the special features of emergency and emergency decision-making team,groupthink is likely to appear.Groupthink is a kind of thinking in which during the decision-making process,the pursuing consistency tendency is over the tendency of assessing the alternatives reasonably.It can determine the results of emergency decision-making to a great extent.The Social psychology research thinks that leadership style is the main reason affecting thinking process and decision-making results.Leadership styles can affect the tendency of pursuing consistency within the team by improving the team’s information communication and affecting the team emotional factors.Therefore,we can see that the leadership style,team emotional factor and groupthink are related.Through establishing different team emotion,different leadership styles can bring different influences on groupthink.Which kind of leadership style is more suitable for emergency decision-making and can effectively control groupthink? Which kind of leadership style can bring positive influence on the team emotions of handling emergency decision-making? Can team emotion mediate between the leadership styles and groupthink? All these problems are worth to be deeply considered and researched.This study chooses transformational leadership style,transactional leadership style,team emotions and groupthink as research subject and investigates the relationship between leadership style,team emotions and groupthink under the situation of emergency decision-making.Firstly,the review is carried out to research the theories and researches on emergency decision-making,groupthink,leadership style and team emotions.Then based on the summary of the current research achievements and shortcomings,a conceptual model that takes emergency decision-making as background,the leadership style as antecedent,team emotions as intermediate variable and takes the emergency time urgency and harmfulness as moderating variables is established and related research hypotheses are proposed.Then based on the current reference review,the questionnaire is designed to make the questionnaire research.Then the test is carried out on the conceptual model and 18 related research hypotheses by using the correlation analysis,multiple regression analysis and related statistical method based on the data provided by the 181 teams that have rich experience in emergency decision-making,including the enterprises,colleges and universities,governments and fire fighting forces.The empirical test structure can support 16 hypotheses.At last,the essay makes further discussion about the results and contributions of research hypotheses.Compared with current research,the innovative works of this study are mainly presented in the following aspects:Firstly,discuss how the leadership styles influence groupthink in the emergency decision-makingThe research shows that in emergency decision-making,the leadership style does have great influence on groupthink.The transformational leadership style has great negative influence on groupthink and the transactional leadership style has great positive influence on groupthink.By far,the research of the influence of leadership styles on groupthink usually chooses “autocratic”,“democratic” and “command” leader styles as research subjects.However,according to the specific situations of the emergency decision-making,the leadership styles mentioned above are not suitable.Usually the emergency decision-making team is a temporary organization composed of a leader,related staffs and social experts.The team leader always brings her or his normalized leadership style into the emergency decision-making team.Thus,the study chooses the “transformational” and “transactional” leadership styles as research subjects to explore transformational leader style and transactional leader style’s influences on groupthink under the specific conditions of emergency decision-making.This study is a useful supplement for existing leadership style researches.Meanwhile,by now most domestic groupthink researches are carried out from the conceptual analysis and mathematical derivation aspects and rare empirical studies are carried out.In the essay,the foreign groupthink empirical study method and tools are combined with China national conditions and the actual situations of emergency decision-making are taken into consideration to form an operational scale which provides new thoughts and tools for Chinese groupthink research.Secondly,discuss mediate function of team emotions between the leadership styles and groupthinkThe research shows that the transformational leader can create the positive team emotions about others and about people themselves,decrease the negative team emotions about others and about people themselves as well as decrease the appearance chances of groupthink in group decision making process.However,transactional leader can create the negative team emotions about other and about people themselves,decrease the positive team emotions about others and about people themselves andincrease the appearance chances of groupthink in team decision making process.The research is carried out from the team emotions aspect.It researches the influence of leadership styles on groupthink in emergency decision-making process.It explores a new mediate mechanism and provides new thoughts and view angles for researching the influence of leadership styles on groupthink.Emergency decision-making is a kind of unconventional and non-procedural risk decision-making implemented under some pressure.Therefore,the emergency decision-making participators shall unavoidably be affected by the mental pressure and emotional reacts.Lots of theoretical and practice researches prove that emotions have great influence on people’s decision-making.However,most of these researches are carried out from individual level and they mainly research the individual leader or decision-maker’s emotions influence on decision-making.Taking the emergency decision-making as the background,the research analyzes the team emotions’ mediate function between the leadership styles and groupthink from the team level.It observes the adjustment function of the time urgency and serious consequences characters on the relationship of team emotions and groupthink.The research offers a new view angle for understanding the groupthink forming mechanism and provides more detail management suggestions for emergency management practice in China.Thirdly,it introduces the moderator function of the emergency time urgency and harmfulness in the relation of team emotions on groupthink.The research result shows that,under high time pressure,the weakening function of positive team emotions about others and about people themselves on groupthink is greatly decreased and the negative team emotions about others will greatly strengthen the groupthink.The negative team emotions about people themselves do not have great influence on the moderate groupthink.Under the great harmfulness,the weakening function of positive team emotions about others and about people themselves on groupthink is greatly decreased and the negative team emotions about others will greatly strengthen the groupthink.The negative team emotions about people themselves do not have great influence on the moderate of groupthink.Taking the emergency time urgency and harmfulness into consideration as particular situational factors will play great contingency effect on emergency decision-making,make research results more consistent with the actual situations of emergency decision-making and provide more reference meanings.