Taking a Look at Social Loafing

Consider a team of at least two students attempting to complete an assignment. Assuming that tasks are distributed equally, each student is only ever responsible for, at most, one half of the entire project. While this division of labor may seem to lighten the load of everyone, it presents a number of issues. Every student working on one project receives the same grade, but only contributes to at most half of the effort required to receive that grade. In much greater proportion are an individual’s grades determined by the efforts of others. Therefore, one student may suffer from the poor quality work of another despite the fact that the former’s work was of high quality. To avoid this situation, a student might decide to do more than his or her share of the work in order ensure that the entire project is done well. In turn, other students might decide not to work as hard if they know that someone else is willing to do their work for them. The unfortunate outcome of these opposing behaviors is a cycle of unequal work ethic. To paraphrase Vilfredo Pareto’s famous principle; twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the

This means, motivation techniques based on human need of emotion, bonding, and learning. “Drive to Bond” (McShane, Steen & Tasa, 2014, p.116) is one out of the four theories Joe used in the first summer. The theory states that the forming of social relationships with coworkers as well as with the manager increases motivation within the company. It is clearly shown in the case that the workers all have a well established relationship with each other. They are able to communicate with each other to distinguish tasks, as well as eat and make jokes together during lunch and/or brakes. This desire to bond and create groups motivates workers to cooperate and feel confident in the environment in which they work. Another upside to the bond the workers have is that their joking and talking does not interfere with their work.

Social loafing – someone decides to take a free ride and let the group do the work

This is important for high job satisfaction as it can affect an organizations performance. Self-determination theory taps into an employee’s motivation, which increases their effort at work. An organization that has a high level of intrinsic motivation allows their employees opportunity for growth and to participate in management decisions; thus, increasing the incidence of employees being engaged. Whereas, organizations who do not promote an intrinsic motivation environment has employees who are less engaged with less regard for organizational policies. This addresses the third hypothesis of employees report lover levels of intrinsic motivation will more than likely engage in deviant behavior towards the organization.

This occurs when people in a group exert less effort when working as a group as opposed to working individually. Maybe some people were less engaged than other because they just wanted to get the activity over with. Or, they might not handle alpha personalities well, so they chose to sit back and go with the flow to avoid arguing with team members. There is also some chance members just did not care to much for the activity. Additionally, some might have been less engaged because they trusted the people in the group were smart enough to properly complete the activity. This is the free rider effect where the members do not put in the same effort since they know others efforts will cover their

One thing that I noticed is that I didn’t find any social loafing among our group members. I have heard a lot of social loafing happening in group projects from my friends, and I think it is natural to have one. One of the main reasons why Socialism failed is because people didn’t do their assigned job as they were all sharing the outcome. People tend to work a lot less when the task is not their own responsibility. However, with the competition against other teams, the reward that the professor offered, and limited time and resources, our group members did their job

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one plus one equals two. However, under some circumstances, one plus one can astoundingly exceed two. For instance, if every team member collaborates and coordinates with each other, the group is inclined to work efficiently and harmoniously and achieve more than the collective work fulfilled by every member separately. Group collaboration plays a more and more important role in not only our daily lives, but also at work. For this reason, people could almost accomplish nothing without joint effort. In “Committees, Juries, and Teams”, James Surowiecki acknowledges that sometimes collective knowledge can fail with disastrous consequences and suggests that groups are successful only under

Social facilitation is when a person’s performance is affected by the people around the performer and social loafing is when a group of people lack to do work.

Two contradictory theories exist regarding how persons are likely to perform in groups or teams. According to the theory of social loafing, it is far easier to conceal one's laziness in a group setting than in a setting where one's individual output is being measured. A good example of this is in a game of tug-o-war. When two people are engaged in the match, it is obvious who is the stronger person will be based upon the visible winner, so both people are likely to try very hard to win to avoid social embarrassment. But when there are a large number of people on either side of the rope, people will pull less hard, rationalizing that others will make up for the effort. One solution to the problem of social loafing is to measure individuals working in teams according to individual as well as team output, but this has the disadvantage of creating friction on the team because people will focus on their own, personal efforts to a greater degree than the ultimate team goal and output. "To avoid social loafing, make sure everyone in a group knows that they can easily be evaluated by others" (Straker, 2012, Social loafing).

Benjamin Voyer defined the psychology of teamwork in the article. The study of teamwork was originated with the development of social psychology and interest on how groups behave, predominantly as against another group. There were two groups that were discussed in the article that contributed to the study of teamwork. The first group is “in group” as described as being a member of a group who share a particular interest or activity and defines who you are. The second group was described as a group outside one 's own with which one feels no sense of identity. This second group is termed as “out group”. Hellen Keller’s cliché enunciates that we can do so little if we are alone and we can do so much if we will work as a team.

Having tasks that are too difficult or are unfamiliar are likely to incite social loafing because they group member lacks the ability or courage to provide input. Robbins and Judge (2011) theorize that another cause of social loafing is an uneven equity. When two people are putting in different levels of input and receiving the same level of output the larger contributor will adjust their input to reduce cognitive dissonance. Another reason they believe is “dispersion of responsibility” group members cannot be held responsible because tasks and roles are not clearly assigned. (Robbins & Judge, 2011). In research by Worchel and others (1998) it was found that groups with friends or familiar members are far less likely to loaf when compared with groups made up of strangers (Worchel, Rothgerber, Day, Hart, & Butemeyer, 1998) Most people have been in a group made up of friends and colleges they are familiar with and seen that in these types of groups social loafing is drastically reduced.

Social loafing is the effect that people will exert less effort if they are working in a collective environment. Working in groups is an integral part of everyday life because it happens in almost every context whether it is sports teams, organizational groups, project groups and even juries. Therefore it is important to understand the underlying factors that influence this construct. The current research composed of 20 participants, investigated the social loafing effect of two working conditions: Coactive and Collective. It was hypothesized that collective groups would have significantly lower scores than coactive and the results supported this prediction strongly as there was a significant difference between the groups. These results

Employees with this mind think they should consider their place as priority based on several factors, for example, they think that the company has paid a lot of money on their training so they should not waste this effort of the organization and pay it back with their loyalty and commitment. So this dimension links the social and moral duty of individuals with their company’s goals (Powell & Meyer,

The literature review, explain the theories which are related to the case study’s problems in order to the motivation and satisfy employees’ needs. There are three important theories include; organizational motivation justice, Maslow’s hierarchy needs theory, and expectancy theory.

Social Loafing and Recommendations on How to Reduce Its Occurrence within Groups Working on University Poster Presentations