BUSI 240 Week 5 Discussion Board Forum 3 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 3 Thread: Social Loafing in Teams

BUSI 240 Organizational Behavior and Management, Discussion Board Forum 3 Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The team example is a composite; the textbook and studies cited are real, and textbook locations are given by chapter.

My term this time is social loafing. McShane and Von Glinow (2015, ch. 8) use it for the slump in effort, and often in results, that appears when people's work is combined in a team instead of done alone. Almost everyone has seen it in a group project, but the research shows it is not simply a matter of lazy individuals. It is a predictable effect of how groups are set up.

The original evidence came from simple experiments. Latane et al. (1979) asked people to clap and shout as loudly as they could, alone or in groups, and found that the noise each person produced dropped as the group grew larger. Part of the drop came from coordination problems, but even when participants only believed they were part of a group, individual effort still declined. People seemed to reduce their effort when their own contribution could not be heard on its own.

Karau and Williams (1993) combined 78 studies and confirmed that social loafing appears across many tasks and populations. More important for managers, they identified when it shrinks. Effort held up better in four circumstances: someone could see what each person contributed, the work mattered to the people doing it, the group consisted of friends or people they cared about, and members believed the others would fall short unless they pitched in. People do not loaf because they are in a group; they loaf because the group lets their effort disappear.

A composite example shows these conditions at work. In a four-person class project, one member attended meetings but contributed almost nothing to the final report. Looking back, the conditions for loafing were all present: the report was submitted under one group name with no record of who wrote what, the topic was assigned rather than chosen, the members had never met before and the other three seemed able to carry the work. None of that excuses the behavior, but it explains it. The other three members also contributed to the problem by quietly covering the missing work instead of raising it early, which removed any signal that the member's effort was needed.

The research and the textbook suggest four remedies. First, make contributions identifiable, for example by assigning named sections and tracking edits. Second, give the task meaning by connecting it to members' goals or letting them choose part of the topic. Third, keep teams small enough that each role is necessary. Fourth, invest early in getting to know one another, since people work harder for a group they value (McShane & Von Glinow, 2015, ch. 8).

Which of these remedies have you seen work in your own teams, and which was hardest to put into practice?

References

Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 681-706. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.4.681

Latane, B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979). Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(6), 822-832. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.6.822

McShane, S. L., & Von Glinow, M. A. (2015). Organizational behavior: Emerging knowledge, global reality (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.