Social Loafing: When Groups Are Bad for Productivity

Social Loafing: When Groups Are Bad for Productivity

When social loafing strikes and how it can be reduced.

Groups can be fantastically unproductive because they provide such wonderful
camouflage. Under cover of group work people will slack off, happy in the knowledge
others are probably doing the same. And even if they're not: who'll know?

This is what psychologists have nattily called social loafing and it was beautifully
demonstrated by a French professor of agricultural engineering called Max
Ringelmann as early as the 1890s.

Ringelmann, often credited as one of the founders of social psychology, had people
pull on ropes either separately or in groups of various sizes and he measured how
hard they pulled. He found that the more people were in the group, the less work
they did (see graph).

Notice that people did about half as much work when there were 8 others in the
group than they did on their own.

Lazy and you know it? Don't bother clapping your hands

Since Ringelmann's original study many others have got the same result using
different types of tasks. Most entertainingly Professor Bibb Latané and colleagues
had people cheering, shouting and clapping in groups as loud as they could (Latané
et al., 1979). When people were in groups of six they only shouted at one-third of
their full capacity. The lazy so-and-sos.

The effect has been found in different cultures including Indians, Taiwanese, French,
Polish and Americans, it's been found in tasks as diverse as pumping air, swimming,
evaluating poems, navigating mazes and in restaurant tipping. However social
loafing is less prevalent in collectivist cultures such as those in many Asian
countries, indeed sometimes it is reversed.

It's not hard to see why this finding might worry people in charge of all kinds of
organisations. But note that social loafing is most detrimental to the productivity of a
group when it is carrying out 'additive tasks': ones where the effort of each group
member is summed. Not all tasks fit in to this category. For example a group
problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group - social
loafing wouldn't necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.

Causes and remedies

These are some of the standard explanations put forward for the social loafing effect:

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 People expect each other to loaf. Whether consciously or unconsciously
people say to themselves: everyone else is going to slack off a bit so I'll slack
off a bit as well because it's not fair if I do more work than the others.

 Anonymity. When groups are larger the individuals become more
anonymous. Imagine you're doing something on your own: if it goes well you
get all the glory, if it goes wrong you get all the blame. In a group both blame
and glory is spread, so there's less carrot and less stick.

 No standards. Often groups don't have set standards so there's no clear
ideal for which to aim.

These explanations naturally beg the question of how people would behave if they
didn't expect each other to loaf, they weren't anonymous and there were clear
standards - after all groups do often work under much better conditions than those
induced in some laboratory studies. Indeed lab studies have often been criticized for
giving people boring or meaningless tasks and for putting them in random groups.

Still people in groups clearly do loaf in real life so here are a few factors found to be
important in reducing social loafing:

 Task importance. Studies have shown that when people think the task is
important they do less loafing. Zacarro (1984)found that groups constructing
'moon tents' (don't ask me!) worked harder if they thought the relevance of the
task was high, thought they were in competition with another group and were
encouraged to think the task was attractive.

 Group importance. When the group is important to its members they work
harder. Worchel et al. (1998) had people building paper chains in two groups,
one which had name tags, matching coats and a sense of competition.
Compared to a group given none of these, they produced 5 more paper
chains.

 Decreasing the 'sucker effect'. The sucker effect is that feeling of being
duped when you think that other people in the group are slacking off.
Reducing or eliminating this perception is another key to a productive group.

This is just three, many more have been suggested, including: how easily each
member's contribution can be evaluated, how unique each individual's contribution is
and how individually identifiable they are. The drift is that people can be made to
work harder by cutting off their natural tendency to hide in the group.

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