A study of groupthink in online community

Abstract

Groupthink phenomenon is getting a lot of consideration and many authors have studied about it in the historical research. Base on the development of information technology, people can study, entertain and work together in online communities on the Internet. Consequently, this paper studies about Groupthink phenomenon that can affect the decision-making quality of online communities in Korea. This empirical study towards the respondents was in Korea who currently participate online communities. The total number of surveys collected 285 samples, after removing the invalid samples, and 249 samples were used to conduct the analysis. Our analysis shows that organizational structural faults does not affect overestimation of the group, cohesion of a group also does not affect closed-mindedness and overestimation of the group also does not affect symptoms of defective decision-making. The results achieved in this study are potentially essential for future researches for online communities.