Social Loafing in Cheerleaders: Effects of Team Membership and Competition

Abstract

The group performance literature suggests that when individuals work together on a task, they tend to exert less effort than when they perform the same task individually (Jackson & Williams, 1985). This reduction of individual effort when individuals are collectively held responsible for a task has been termed social loafing (LatanC, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Social loafing has been demonstrated to occur in a variety of physically effortful tasks such as rope pulling (Ingham, Levinger, Graves, & Peckham, 1974), noise production (Latank et al., 1979), and force production (Kerr & Brunn, 1981). This effect has also been demonstrated for tasks requiring cognitive effort such as evaluation of essays (Petty, Harkins, Williams, & Latan6, 1977), brainstorming, and vigilance (Harkins & Petty, 1982). Moreover, social loafing has been found to characterize the behavior of both males and females of all ages (Harkins, Latant?, & Williams, 1980; LatanC, 1986), in betweenas well as within-subjects designs (Harkins et al., 1980; Kerr & B r u ~ , 1981), and in both individualistic and collective cultures (LatanC, 1986). Thus, social loafing appears to be a rather robust phenomenon, threatening effective collective endeavor. However, several factors have been identified that appear to moderate the magnitude of this effect. Specifically, loafing was eliminated when individual efforts were identifiable (Williams, Harkins, & Latank, 1981), when individuals perceived that they made a unique contribution to the group effort or performed difficult tasks (Harkins & Petty, 1982), when individuals performed with friends versus strangers (Williams, 1981), when conjunctive and disjunctive tasks were employed (Kerr, 1983), and when the task was personally involving (Brickner, Harkins, & Ostrom, 1986). However, the research conditions of many of these investigations created motivational properties that appear to be in opposition to those associated with established teams performing a team-related task under competitive conditions. That is, social loafing may be restricted to tasks that are seen as unimportant, meaningless, or lacking in intrinsic motivation, performed by relative strangers in noncompetitive contexts. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to investigate social loafing among established teams performing an intrinsically motivating team-related task under competitive conditions.