Group buy-in: How the urge to fit in sways purchase satisfaction

Corporations utilize multi-person buying committees to be sure that high-ticket decisions are based on broad input and merit. But new research about customer satisfaction that draws on social identity theory shows that members of buying groups may align their opinions with those of the group, especially if the individual members are strongly connected. W. P. Carey marketing Professor Ruth Bolton says managers should consider this issue when forming buying groups and setting up their processes. Other measures to protect the process include building a measure of anonymity into reports, providing information well in advance of discussions, and fostering a culture where it is OK to disagree.

No one wants to be viewed as a corporate "yes man" — or woman — but recent research suggests that, at times, most of us fit that bill. When scholars studied the effects of group interaction on an individual's "buyer satisfaction," they found that "people tend to move toward the group's opinion," says Ruth Bolton, professor of marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

Bolton's research also found that conformity with group views is more pronounced among those who have a strong affiliation with their colleagues. What's more, group discussion tends to escalate an individual's satisfaction or the lack of it. So, even though corporate buying groups generally are expected to rate products or service contracts on merits only, Bolton's work shows that biases and social influences are coming into play.

Like it or not

"Satisfaction is one of the most widely studied constructs," Bolton says, but she adds that usually customer satisfaction is measured using the "disconfirmation of expectations" paradigm. In that model, satisfaction or dissatisfaction is what's left when you compare customer expectations with the actual service or product quality the customer perceives. For example, if a restaurant customer expects a delicious burrito but winds up with what she considers to be tasteless glop, expectations aren't met and dissatisfaction results.

Such measures of customer satisfaction are focused exclusively on an individual. The problem is, many buying decisions occur en masse. Think about quarter-million dollar support-services agreements, restoration contracts in flood-damaged areas like New Orleans or enormous telecommunications equipment buys. These are the types of purchases organizations might make with input from a multi-person buying group.

"I think we all assume that business people are trained to make decisions by focusing on the facts," Bolton says. Still, she and her colleagues wondered if the kinds of biases that have been recorded in psychology experiments exist in high-stakes business decisions. "As it turns out, they do," she says.

Gang reaction

Bolton conducted her research with Jos Antonio Rosa from the University of Illinois in Chicago, William Qualls from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Jonathan Bohlmann from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. What differentiates this team's research is its evaluation of opinions before and after buying-group interactions occurred. This allowed the researchers to evaluate how much the group's opinion affected an individual's views.

"People moved their perceptions toward what the group thought," Bolton says. There's a reason for such conformist tendencies. "We value the opinions of others, and we want to be viewed favorably. So, if someone gives a positive opinion, we adjust our opinion to meet theirs."

Bolton et al. also found that movement to group norms is more pronounced when participants felt solidly connected to their team. "The stronger you identify, the more you move toward what the group thinks," Bolton says. She adds that this can lead to a "bandwagon" effect, and it can happen two ways. First, people tend to agree with the group. Second, they tend to react to the discrepancy between what they think the group will say and what the group actually says.

That is, if someone walks into a meeting expecting the group to have a lukewarm assessment of some service provider and, instead, everyone raves about the service, the person who'd expected a tepid group response ups his or her own level of contentment dramatically. "If you expect the group opinion to be positive, and it's even more positive than you expected, it pushes you" to a more extreme view, according to Bolton.

Belonging matters

Years ago, Farm Bureau Insurance companies hawked their wares under the slogan, "Belonging makes a difference." That's the idea behind "social identity theory," a psychological insight that Bolton and her colleagues drew upon to form their own hypotheses and experiments. Social identity theory asserts that people form their self-concepts, in part, through their membership in various groups. Doctor, mom, Democrat, Buddhist: All of these groups come with expressed values and stereotypes attached.

Once we identify with a specific group, we're likely to align our beliefs and behaviors with group norms, Bolton says. It is this tendency that leads to the group's influence on individual satisfaction levels. Another influence on satisfaction levels is what researchers call "the confirmatory bias," which maintains that expectations can become self-fulfilling prophesies. "People tend to see what they expect to see," Bolton explains.

She gives the example of a purchasing manager who oversees 45 contracts with one company. Suppose the manager's evaluation of the supplier's performance on a specific contract is positive — so that he expects future performance to be positive. Even if the contract doesn't go as well as expected, the manager might overlook small to moderate deficiencies because of his confirmatory bias.

Another bias is the "rose-colored glasses" effect, which holds that there tends to be what Bolton calls a "rosy halo" around products, relationships or people one already has decided are OK. "You don't notice minor things that aren't so great if, in general, you have a positive belief about a relationship." Bolton and her colleagues didn't cover either confirmatory bias or the rose-colored glasses effect in this specific study.

However, she has found these inclinations lurking and showing their force in her other studies of managers decisions. "There are a lot of biases operating" when purchasing groups meet in the conference room, Bolton notes. She adds that this is a managerial issue, and one that should be considered when forming buying groups and setting up their processes.

Grappling with groupthink

Now that her research has confirmed how expressed and implicit opinions of others influence a person's satisfaction judgments, Bolton has found herself viewing group decision-making processes with a more critical eye. For instance, she is currently engaged in an exercise where several scholars are picking top journal articles. "For the first round, I told everybody to send their information to a department secretary. She'll provide a tally of which papers get the most votes."

This way, group participants will see pure data with no personalities attached, Bolton notes. It allows everyone to express an opinion before peer pressure sets in and department rank becomes a factor. Such anonymity might not be a bad idea for any group decision-making exercise, Bolton maintains.

She points to high-tech conference rooms such as ASU's decision theater, a networked space that has state-of-the-art presentation technology, as well as the ability to broadcast expressed viewpoints anonymously through the room. These technologies "can take the identity out of who's speaking, which is good, because sometimes a more junior person will keep quiet, or conflicting information doesn't get brought up," Bolton explains.

Still, companies don't need decision theaters to keep people talking honestly. Groups can solicit information before a session, requiring everyone to voice their views independently, which might bypass the tendency to agree. Or, Bolton sees value in distributing information to the group prior to face-to-face meetings so that everyone has time to examine it before any discussions take place. Reviewing the data is something Bolton recommends for any decision-maker.

"If you're dealing with a lot of high-stakes contracts, you don't want to rely on your global evaluations. When the account team is coming to visit, have all those contracts and reports on your desk so that you're referring to them and not forgetting that three of the 45 contracts from that supplier had very poor delivery time."

Even corporate culture can help companies avoid group biases, Bolton maintains. When managers recognize a tendency to cover up conflicting opinions, they can combat that inclination by making sure people know it's OK to disagree. She adds: "It's not that people aren't paying attention to the actual attribute information of what they're evaluating.

They are paying attention to things like service speed and reliability — all that good stuff." Still peer pressure does exert power in buying-group meetings, she concludes. "When you're making huge decisions that will cost millions and affect lives, it's good to focus on the facts."

Bottom Line

• "Social identity theory" holds that people define their self-concept, in part, by the groups they belong to and that people also align themselves with group norms and beliefs.
• Business people in buying-group situations tend to align themselves with the group's opinions.
• Individual satisfaction with products or services under evaluation tends to move toward the group's views.
• The more an individual identifies with a group, the more that person's views conform to the group's opinions.
• If the group's satisfaction — or dissatisfaction — is higher than what an individual expected, the individual's satisfaction will rise — or drop — to greater extremes, leading to escalation of opinions.
• Smart companies will find ways to help buying groups focus on attribute information — the facts about what is being purchased — and encourage free exchange of information and ideas.