Personal Motivation, Expectation of Others Relate to Social Loafing

Four researchers set up a study of "social loafing," using college students who were invited based on being in the top or bottom 25% of their classes in "achievement motivation," defined as "the tendency of an individual to work toward the achievement of personal goals or standards." They were paired off, told they were in a study on e-mail communication, then separated by screens and not allowed to talk. Then they were asked to come up with as many ideas as they could for use of a particular item, but unknown to them, the messages they supposedly exchanged with their partners were fake. Some people were led to believe their partner would try hard on the study, and others the opposite. Also, although the researchers could count how many ideas every individual came up with, some students believed only the total amount of ideas produced by both people could be counted. (In other words, if any of those people tended to be a social loafer, they would think they could get away with it.)

The results identified only one combination of factors in which people loafed: People with low personal motivation who thought their partners were going to work hard and that their own output could not be counted did not work very hard. On the other hand, people:

• With high achievement motivation worked hard regardless of the other factors.
• Who had low motivation worked harder if they thought their comrades would not work hard, presumably to pick up the slack.
• Who thought the researchers would know how much they individually contributed (that were "monitored," to use the term from the study above) worked harder.

Source: Hart, J., et al. (04), "Achievement Motivation, Expected Coworker Performance, and Collective Task Motivation: Working Hard or Hardly Working?" Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34(5): 984.