Team and Social Loafing Essay

Submitted By tamis84
Words: 1423
Pages: 6
Open Document
Tami Smith
Professor Bailey
MBA 510
30 April 2015

Social Loafing

People in groups often do not work as hard as they do when alone. This is referred to as social loafing. Team productivity often decreases with the increase of group members. A study by a French agricultural engineer named Max Ringelmann exposed this theory. Ringlemann was interested in the relative efficiency of farm labor supplied by horses, oxen, machines, and men. In particular, he was curious about their relative abilities to pull a load horizontally, such as in a tug-of-war. In one of his experiments, he had groups of fourteen men pull a load and measured the amount of force they generated; he also measured the force that each man could pull independently. There was a linear decline in the average pull per member as the size of the rope-pulling team increased. One person pulling on a rope alone exerted an average of 63 kilograms of force. However, in groups of three. the per-person force dropped to 53 kilograms, and in groups of eight, it plummeted to only 31 kilograms per person-less than half of the effort exerted by people working alone (Kravitz).
With the results of the study by Ringlemann, when forming teams, the team size should be limited to no more than ten people per group and focus on similarities of each member as this will boost communication (Thompson 117). People in groups often do not work as hard as they do when alone and team productivity often decreases with the increase of group members. Social loafing should be identified and addressed because it can cause a decline in group cohesion and it is problematic to a team’s performance and productivity.
Social loafing is most likely to occur in large teams where individuals output is difficult to identify. This particularly includes situations in which team members work alone towards a common output pool and independent output is low. Under these conditions, employees aren’t as worried that their performance will be noticed. Social loafing is less likely to occur when the task is interesting, because individuals have a higher intrinsic motivation to perform their duties. It is less common when the groups’ objective is important, because individuals experience more pressure from other team members to perform well. Finally social loafing is less common among members with a strong collective value, because they value group membership and believe in working towards group objectives (The Trouble with Teams: Social Loafing).
With larger groups, people tend to not work as hard as when they are alone for three reasons: diffusion of responsibility, a reduced sense of self-efficacy, and the "sucker effect". “In a team, a person's effort and contributions are less identifiable than when that person works independently. This is because everyone's efforts are pooled into the team enterprise and the return is a function of everyone's contribution. It is difficult to distinguish one person's contribution from another. At an extreme, this can lead to deindividuation-a psychological state in which a person does not feel individual responsibility. As a result, the person is less likely to perform or contribute. This is referred to diffusion of responsibility” (Thompson).
In some cases, it is not diffusion of responsibility that hinders people from contributing to a team effort, but rather the feeling that our contributions will not be as valuable, efficacious, or worthwhile as they might be in a smaller group. In short, we believe our contributions will not be sufficient to justify the effort thus resulting in dispensability of effort (Thompson).
Sucker version is a common concern held by team members in wanting to avoid being the only one left doing all of the work and getting little or no credit. Because everyone wants to avoid being taken advantage of, team members hedge their efforts and wait to see what others will do. The problem is that when everyone does this, no one contributes (Thompson).
Show More

Related Documents: Team and Social Loafing Essay

Essay on Principles Of Management Teamwork

In Principles of Management, the teams are considered as project teams based on the fact that they were formed for one specific task and given a deadline in which to complete it and selfmanaging teams since they have control over everything except the team members and the project itself. An ideal team member for this course would be one with superior interpersonal skills since they will be working with many different people who all have different ideas and personalities. They would also possess significant…

Words 1914 - Pages 8

Teamwork: Group Dynamics and Team Essay

how it can affect performance in team sports. You will be reading about these four factors: • Tuckman’s Stages of group development • Steiner’s Model of Group Effectiveness • Cohesion • Social loafing What is the difference between a group and team? A team is a gathering of people who work interpedently and are committed to achieve one goal where as a group is a gathering of people who interdependently but have individual responsibility to perform. A team is characterized by commonality in…

Words 1630 - Pages 7

Essay about Groups And Teamwork1

Agenda • Team exercise • Lecture on Groups/Teams Get into your Teams • If you do not have a team, please come see me. Food for Thought • Brainstorming in groups • 12 items belong to a general category • Your task is to come up with as many criteria as you can to classify them into subcategories. Example • • • • • • Taurus Cavalier Saturn Pathfinder Neon Park Avenue • • • • • • Civic Tahoe Camry Sonata Explorer Altima What is the general category? What kind of subgroups can we establish…

Words 822 - Pages 4

Emotional Contagion Paper

Emotional contagion is where positive and negative emotions can be contagious, whereas negative emotions have an enduring effect of its virus-like behavior. It is even more common amongst teams, where team member’s emotions can affect one another. (Bauer, Berrin, 2015, p. 193) The textbook mentions that research shows that when the boss is happy, the positive emotions spread to the staff, therefore making the staff happy. Negative emotions can also spread, but has a more forceful tactic, for instance…

Words 1123 - Pages 5

Essay on Management and Norms Performance Norms

Groups and Teams Groups – two or more people, interdependence, common goals • Types of groups Formal Group: Defined by the organization’s structure with designated work assignments establishing tasks -Command Group A group composed of the individuals who report directly to a given manager -Task Group Those working together to complete a job or task in an organization but not limited by hierarchical boundaries Informal Group: Appear naturally in response to the need for social contact Deeply…

Words 765 - Pages 4

Essay on Organisational behaviour

Teams + Leadership Group Dynamics Group: Two or more people acting interdependently to achieve a common objective. The “strength” of the interaction depends on: 1. The nature of the common objective 2. The context in which it takes place 3. The temperament of the group members. Kind of groups Groups can be FORMAL or INFORMAL, the work of the Human Relations School. FORMAL: In organizations, formal groups are intentionally formed to achieve an objective set by the organization itself…

Words 2055 - Pages 9

Essay on Organizational Behavior and Leadership

Theory 3) Which stage of the five-stage group development model is characterized by developing close relationships and cohesiveness? Norming 4) What defines a set of expected behavior patterns attributed to a person occupying a given position in a social unit? Group role 5) Which type of group is defined by the organization's structure? Formal group 6) Which term describes the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually?…

Words 922 - Pages 4

Tuckman's Five-Stage Model Of Group Development

establish ourselves within an organization or even move forward with our career paths working in teams or guiding teams is inevitable. Over the last few weeks of this course we have studied out teams operate and how, as leaders, we are to assemble our teams, ultimately leading them to success. This weeks self-assessment helped me understand and validate how I feel about working with or guiding teams. When we work together as one unit, with one clear vision, we can gain perspectives we may not have…

Words 795 - Pages 4

Essay about Case Study the Forgotten Group Member

the Storming stage. While some of the team has come together and are providing their assigned portions of the class project, they still are not a cohesive, and functioning team; due to one of their team members being preoccupied with outside demands and not really coming together with the rest of the team. By having a better understanding of the stages of group development, Christine would have had a better idea…

Words 955 - Pages 4

Organisational Beh Essays

completion of the project. This report is about the poster exhibition which was given to us as an assignment. A group had to be formed depending upon the Belbin Test results. The group comprised of five members in total in which one was a plant, one a team worker, another a monitor evaluator, yet another a shaper, and myself, a completer finisher. Coming to the Stages of Group Development, there were four stages which I observed,namely, Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing (Tuckman 1965). In…

Words 1092 - Pages 5