Groupthink Challenger Disaster Essay Example

uniqueness and independent thinking.

The dysfunctional group dynamics of the "ingroup" produces an illusion of invulnerability or an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made. Thus the "ingroup" significantly overrates their own abilities in decision-making, and significantly underrates the abilities of their opponents. Now its time to provide some background about Challenger disaster in 1986. According to Bergin (2007), the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members.

The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida. Disintegration of the entire vehicle began after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. The O-ring failure caused a breach in the SRB joint it sealed, allowing pressurized hot gas from within the solid rocket motor to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent SRB attachment hardware and external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the right-hand SRBs aft attachment and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces promptly broke up the orbiter.

The theory of groupthinking can be applied towards the disaster, but it is also very controversial. According to Wells (2005), groupthink only comes into play as a contributing cause of failure on the day of the launch, in the meeting of managers of one of the contractors. Their decision, to ignore their engineer's recommendations is talked about in the report, but they also talk about why there should have been other systems at work to question that decision, to ensure it was correct, to

ensure it was safe. According to his opinion, the absence of that checking process has nothing to do with groupthink either.

The focus on groupthink causes business folks attempting to learn from the Challenger disaster to miss the major lessons and focus on a less important one, allowing them to repeat the same mistakes. According to the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (1986), the unrelenting pressure to meet the demands of an accelerating flight schedule might have been adequately handled by NASA if it had insisted upon the exactingly thorough procedures that were its hallmark during the Apollo program.

An extensive and redundant safety program comprising interdependent safety, reliability and quality assurance functions existed during and after the lunar program to discover any potential safety problems. Between that period and 1986, however, the program became ineffective. This loss of effectiveness seriously degraded the checks and balances essential for maintaining flight safety. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report (2003) concludes that while NASA's present Space Shuttle is not inherently unsafe, a number of mechanical fixes are required to make the Shuttle safer in the short term.

The report also concludes that NASA's management system is unsafe to manage the shuttle system beyond the short term and that the agency does not have a strong safety culture. The Board determined that physical and organizational causes played an equal role in the Columbia accident - that the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with the accident as the foam that struck the Orbiter on ascent. The report also notes other significant factors and observations that may help

prevent the next accident.

As a conclusion, it is important to notice that groupthink continues to be a prolific and somewhat controversial topic in psychology research. Many major studies focusing on some aspect or application of groupthink have been published over the years. According to Brooke (2011), one of the more popular current research trends includes comparing the prevalence of groupthink in a diverse corporate environment to that of a less diverse firm.