Leadership and learning in political groups: The management of advice in the Iran-contra affair

For over two decades, the theory of groupthink proposed by Irving Janis has remained the most prominent analysis of group dynamics in policymaking. Suffering from ifs own popularity, groupthink has become a catch-all phrase without a clear meaning. Moreover, theories of group decision-making-even when applied to public policy-making-have typically ignored political variables,focusing almost exclusively on psychological arguments. This article offers three more narrowly construed propositions about policy-making groups: (1) that extremes in the distribution of power within a decision group reduces the integrative complexity of that group's deliberations and, thus, a leader's ability to learn; (2) that extremes in group size produce similar effects; and (3) that the integrative complexity of deliberations is improved when power concentration is appropriate to group size. An examination of the Reagan Administration's decision-making in two phases of the Iran-Contra affair lends support to these hypotheses and reveals the importance of political structure in decision group dynamics.