Effects of personal involvement: Thought-provoking implications for social loafing.

Abstract

In 1979, Latane, Williams, and Harkins observed that individuals working together put out less effort than when they work alone, an effect these researchers termed social loafing. Subsequent research (Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981) has suggested that this effect arises, at least in part, because when participants work with others on these tasks their individual outputs are lost in the crowd, and, thus, they can receive neither credit nor blame for their performances. However, it is unlikely that participants found the tasks used in these experiments (e.g., clapping, shouting) to be involving. The possibility that personal involvement could moderate the social loafing effect was tested in a 2 (high/ low involvement) X 2 (high/low identifiability) factorial design across three replications. Replicating previous loafing research, we found that under conditions of low involvement, participants whose outputs were identifiable worked harder than those whose outputs were pooled. However, when the task was personally involving, the loafing effect was eliminated. Participants whose outputs were pooled worked as hard as those participants whose individual outputs could be identified.In 1979, Latane, Williams and Harkins rekindled interest in a phenomenon they termed social loafing. Social loafing refers to the finding that participants put out less effort when working together than when working alone. This effect has been demonstrated on tasks that require physical effort (shouting: Latane et al.

Positive Effekte sozialen Faulenzens beim Lösen komplexer Probleme

“…Dieser Motivationsverlust wird auch als soziales Faulenzen (social loafing) bezeichnet (Karau und Williams 1993, 1995, 1997Latané, Williams, und Harkins 1979). (Brickner et al 1986;Harkins und Petty 1982). Diesen Befunden zufolge wird die Leistung im Falle subjektiv bedeutsamer Aufgaben nicht dadurch beeinflusst, ob diese in Gruppen oder alleine erbracht werden.…”

Dynamic tabletop interfaces for increasing creativity

“…Equity corresponds to the inverse of social loafing and correlates to the Collective Intelligence of a group, a factor that explains the group's performance on a wide variety of tasks (Woolley et al, 2010). Furthermore, our results showed that the attractiveness of the tabletop device increased extrinsic motivation to engage in the task, which is also a moderating factor of social loafing (Brickner et al, 1986;Shepperd, 1993).…”

3 és 5 – a problémamegoldás hatékonyságának csoportlétszáma

“…A koordinációs veszteségek száma minimálisra csökken a vizsgálatok szerint, ha a feladat érdekes. Ilyenkor ez a külső motiváció is segít a csoportnak (Brickner, Harkins és Ostrom, 1986).…”