PSYC 405 Week 6 DB Forum 5 Example

Discussion Board Forum 5: Thread and Two Replies

PSYC 405 Group Dynamics, Discussion Board Forum 5 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; the textbook and the journal article are real and described from their published sources; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for PSYC 405.

Thread

Two summers ago, six teenagers from our church youth group washed 84 cars in a Saturday fundraiser. Last summer, twelve volunteers signed up, and we washed 71. More people produced fewer clean cars. Some of the difference was crowding around the hoses, but much of it was visible: clusters of volunteers talking by the cooler while others scrubbed. Nobody refused to work; each volunteer simply seemed to assume that someone else had the next car covered.

Forsyth (2017) describes this pattern as part of the Ringelmann effect, in which individual output declines as groups grow. He separates two causes. Coordination losses occur when members get in each other's way or fail to combine their efforts efficiently. Motivation losses occur when members simply try less hard, which is social loafing.

Karau and Williams (1993) combined 78 studies of social loafing in a meta-analysis. They found that loafing was robust and appeared across many kinds of tasks and participants, but that it shrank or disappeared under particular conditions: when individual work could be evaluated, when people expected their coworkers to perform poorly on a task they cared about, when the task was meaningful and in more collectivist cultures. To explain these patterns, they proposed the Collective Effort Model, which holds that a member's effort in a group rises and falls with two beliefs: that trying harder will actually change the result, and that the result is worth having.

That model suggests three changes for next summer's car wash. First, make contributions identifiable, perhaps by assigning each pair of volunteers their own bay and tallying their cars. Second, connect the work to something the teens care about, such as the mission trip the money supports. Third, keep the group size matched to the task, so no one feels unnecessary. Eight volunteers on two shifts, with a tally board by the street, might wash more cars than twelve at once.

Classmates: is your research group's work structured in a way that makes loafing more or less likely?

Reply to Shannon

Shannon, you worried that online research groups invite loafing, since members never meet and can disappear for days. Karau and Williams (1993) would agree that the risk is real when contributions are hidden. Yet our course already includes a strong safeguard: each member writes an individually assigned section, posts it for the group and submits it separately. That makes each person's work identifiable, the condition that most reliably reduced loafing in their analysis. Forsyth (2017) adds that clear goals and deadlines help. Perhaps the remaining risk lies in the shared parts, such as the introduction and conclusion, which might be assigned to named members too.

Reply to Victor

Victor, you argued that loafing can be reasonable, such as when a teammate is already doing a task well and extra effort would add little. That fits the Collective Effort Model from Karau and Williams (1993), which predicts that people reduce effort when they believe it will not change the outcome. In that sense, loafing can be a rational response to a poorly designed task rather than a character flaw. Forsyth (2017) notes, though, that loafing tends to spread, since members who see others coasting may reduce their own effort to avoid being exploited. Even if one person's choice seems sensible, the group may pay a price over time.

References

Forsyth, D. R. (2017). Group dynamics (7th ed.). Cengage.

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