To Weaken Or Strengthen?The Impact Of Subgroup On Groupthink

With the popularity of teams and the increasing diversity of team members,subgroup has gradually become the focus of research.At present,scholars mainly focus on exploring the definition,structural attributes and the impact on team outcomes of subgroup(Lau&Murnighan,1998;Thatcher&Patel,2012;Carton&Cummings,2012,2013;Meyer,Shemla,Li,&Wegge,2015),most of them believe that subgroup has negative effects on team performance,such as team conflict,prejudice and identity threats.However,due to the ubiquity of subgroup and their positive role in sharing knowledge and learning behavior(Gibson&Vermeulen,2003;Kim,Gong,Lee&Jing,2013;Cooper,Patel,&Thatcher,2014),it is more meaningful to explore the positive effect of subgroup.This study tries to explore the impact of subgroup(group with subgroup or without subgroup)on groupthink,and analyzes the moderating effect of group interpersonal concerns and group conscientiousness between subgroup and groupthink,in order to solve the relationship between subgroup and groupthink,and bring new directions to the positive role of subgroup.Furthermore,This study tends to explore the impact of subgroup strength(group with strong subgroup or with weak subgroup)on groupthink when subgroup exists.Applied experiment method with 80 teams' data collected from one university and analyzed the relationship among subgroup,group interpersonal concerns,group conscientiousness and groupthink.Main conclusions are as follows:compared with no subgroup exist,the group that with subgroup may reduce the level of group thinking;Group interpersonal concerns and group conscientiousness play moderating roles in the relationship between subgroup and groupthink.subgroup strength may have a negative impact on group thinking,group with weak subgroup experiences less group thinking than strong subgroup.This study enriches theory about subgroup and groupthink,and provides some empirical suggestions for business administration especially for inducing the positive effect of subgroup reasonably and adopting fair team decision-making mechanisms.