Abstract
AbstractPeople exert less effort when performing in groups than when working alone. Based on the collective effort model’s core principle that individuals are only willing to work hard if they expect their individual contribution to be instrumental in obtaining personally satisfying outcomes, this study demonstrates the strong influence of individual motive dispositions on group performance. Motive dispositions vary from person to person and, when triggered by appropriate cues in the environment, form the current motivation and determine behavior. In experimental ad-hoc groups designed to provoke social loafing for individuals with a high need for achievement, i.e. with few opportunities for self-evaluation, team-members with a high need for achievement (N = 28) substantially reduced their effort to participate in the task at hand. Contrary, in the same situation, team-members with a high need for affiliation (N = 55) showed no social loafing at all, but social laboring instead, resulting in nearly 50% be...
Highlights
Groups and teams have become basic building blocks of modern organizations, performing all different types of tasks ranging from physical ones like manufacturing or maintenance to cognitive ones like decision making or problem solving
Based on the collective effort model’s core principle that individuals are only willing to work hard if they expect their individual contribution to be instrumental in obtaining personally satisfying outcomes, this study demonstrates the strong influence of individual motive dispositions on group performance
In the same situation, team-members with a high need for affiliation (N = 55) showed no social loafing at all, but social laboring instead, resulting in nearly 50% better performance in the group task compared to their team members with a high need for achievement
Summary
Groups and teams have become basic building blocks of modern organizations, performing all different types of tasks ranging from physical ones like manufacturing or maintenance to cognitive ones like decision making or problem solving. Considerable evidence indicates that a substantial portion of the team’s decreased performance is due to motivational losses, namely due to social loafing (for a recent review, see Simms & Nichols, 2014). This means, team members exert less effort when they work in a group compared to when they work alone. The same meta-analysis by Karau and Williams (1993) shows that more than one fifth of all reported effect sizes point in the opposite direction Meaning that in these studies, teams increased effort and performance on a collective task compared to an individual condition (social laboring, Haslam, 2004)
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