What is social loafing? How does it happen and how can we counter its effects?

What is social loafing? How does it happen and how can we counter its effects?

Social Loafing is the tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool their efforts toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable.

Social loafing is ubiquitous -- we see it on all kinds of teams, in organizations, at school, and in government. Anywhere where there are groups of people working on communal tasks there will be social loafing. Individuals in collectivist cultures tend to exhibit less social loafing than individuals from individualistic cultures, but they still exhibit it.

All that being said, clearly working on a team can be beneficial. How do we create a situation where people will put their best effort in on the team? How do we decrease social loafing?

To motivate group members, one strategy is to make individual performance identifiable (e.g., viewing football film to evaluate individual players is one strategy that has been adopted to maximize individual performance). Studies have demonstrated that individual effort increases when outputs are measured individually.

Furthermore, people in groups loaf less when:

• The task is challenging
• The task is appealing
• The task is involving

When their members are friends or identify with their group.

It has also been demonstrated that organizational work groups are usually more effective when they are small, and include equally competent individuals. So how should I deal with this in my class? How should I have handled Wayne? Now, in any course where I have group work, I require students in each group to evaluate all the rest of the students in their group, and take a test demonstrating that they understand and can articulate the submitted product that came from the group.