Essay on Working in Groups and Social Loafing - 1810 Words

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†¦show more content†¦Therefore it is important to understand the factors that motivate or demotivate individuals in those contexts in order to improve the collective outcomes that could generally be critiqued as unreliable or invalid due to t he social loafing effect. Previous studies have indicated that the type of cognitive task performed mediates the effect social loafing. For example in challenging tasks that involved brainstorming or generating an ideas, the work teams had an opportunity to contribute their own unique ideas that made it more likely that they suffered consequences of social loafing (Robbins, 1995). Personal involvement has been said to mediate the effects of social loafing. This is a situation where the subjects have intrinsic value or personal meaning that play an important role in the participants lives (Brickner et al., 1986) As a result, high-involvement subjects produced more favourable thoughts whereas low-involvement did not. Weldon and Gargano (1988) suggested that anonymity is associated with group performance. Basically, the larger the group the more difficult it is to monitor individual performance thus individual efforts are unknown and they are free to loaf without fear of social judgme nt (Weldon Gargano, 1988). Therefore it is consistent to say that although social loafing is expected to occur in most collective tasks, this can be decreased or even eliminated if the group performance is being compared to otherShow MoreRelatedSocial Loafing and Recommendations on How to Reduce Its Occurrence within Groups Working on University Poster Presentations1286 Words   |  6 PagesSocial Loafing and Recommendations on How to Reduce Its Occurrence within Groups Working on University Poster Presentations Abstract Social loafing occurs in groups and reduces group effectiveness and productivity. 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