The Relationship between Research Assistants’ Social Loafing and Organizational Commitment

Abstract

Organizational commitment and social loafing are important and interrelated concepts in working life. Employees who think that their performance will decrease and their effort will be lost, their work is not important and meaningful, prefer to hide in the crowd and socially loaf. It is crucial to reveal the exact nature of this relationship in terms of employee productivity, cooperation, competitiveness and inexhaustibility. Organizational commitment and social loafing are thought to have an important efficiency-, performance- and job satisfaction-related impact on the work outcomes of research assistants. This study aims at determining the relationship between social loafing and organizational commitment of research assistants, and finding out whether the levels of social loafing and organizational commitment differ significantly depending on the type of staff and length of service. The criterion sampling method, one of the purposeful sampling methods, was used for the sampling. The participants are 34 research assistants working in a faculty. Correlational survey model was used to investigate the relationship between the levels of organizational commitment and social loafing of research assistants. Personal Information Recognition Form, Organizational Commitment Scale, and Social Loafing Scale were used as the data collection tools. Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlation analyses, independent sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance and Kruskal-Wallis analysis were used in the analysis of the data. A significant and inverse relationship was found between affective commitment (as a sub-dimension of organizational commitment) and social loafing. No significant difference could be identified between the groups in social loafing and organizational commitment levels in terms of demographic variables.