CASE STUDY

Group Decision Making in Hiring Collegiate Coaches

Scholars and advocates have documented the relative scarcity of women (of all races and ethnicities) and of minority men and women in coaching positions in both collegiate and professional sport (Lapchick, 2016; LaVoi, 2017).Data reported by Lapchick (2016) showed that nearly 90 percent of coaches at the Division I level were white and only about 8 percent were African American.In this context, imagine that you are an athletic director involved in the search for a new head football coach at a Division I FBS school.On one hand, you are seeking to increase the diversity of your coaching staff, which means that you will focus on recruiting and interviewing a representatively diverse mix of potential candidates. At the same time, you understand that the process of selecting a new football coach does not come down to an individual decision that you can make on your own. Instead, it will be made by a search committee that includes senior leaders in the athletic department, the faculty athletics representative (typically a professor on campus), and senior leaders in the universitys overall administration.Based on your understanding of the group decision-making process, you want to avoid the challenges of group decision making while retaining the benefi ts asso-ciated with group-based decisions. You also want to avoid making errors based on confi rmation bias. As you prepare for the search committees fi rst meetingat which the group will discuss the process for recruiting, interviewing, and selecting the new coachyou provide the members with specifi c guidelines for reaching an optimal decision.

1. How might you reduce groupthink when the search committee reviews re-sumes from the top candidates?