Social Loafing

What is it: when individual effort is hidden and we work less efficiently (slack off) in groups than we would alone…

“I don’t need to work as hard in this team, someone will take up the slack and I won’t get blamed…”

Overview

If one developer gets X amount of work done in a day, three developers in a group will get three times as much done, right? Wrong! In a tug-of-war competition, double the members, double the pull, right? Wrong!

When we work in groups, where individual effort is less easy to track, we slack off, just a bit, but it’s enough to be measured, and it needs to be accounted for, particularly in planning and predicting effort or resourcing.

This was first coined by Max Ringelmann who undertook an experiment on tug-of-war. He noticed the individual effort was not seen in groups. and the larger the group, the larger the tendancy.

It’s a form of motivation loss, if we’re not going to get the full rewards, why put in the full effort?

The underlying psychology is that effort feels less visible and less rewarded in a group setting, leading individuals to unconsciously conserve energy. The larger the group, the easier it becomes to hide within it.

Social loafing isn’t always about laziness though, it’s about feeling like we matter as individuals and is more related to self confidence , responsibility and buy in to work. In soccer, you often see huge improvements in a player’s performance when they’re made Captain, for example.

What can we do to avoid this?

The way to avoid this is pretty simple, monitor individual performance and make individuals visible. Group sales teams can be incentivised to achieve group targets, that builds team spirit, but also reward individual effort and results within a group.

Make an effort to proactively engage individuals in meetings too, don’t let individuals sink into the background. We often explain that training online is difficult because it’s not easy to see when individuals are disengaged, but that is a key skills as a trainer or coach.

Examples

• One of the most common examples is in software development teams. When predicting the effort required to complete a project, it’s easy to look at the total effort and divide it by the number of members in the team. In practice, you don’t get double the effort, for double the resource, you need to account for say, 180%. The more people in the team, the more you need to account for this bias.
• In meetings, the more people there are in attendance, the less likely they are all to contribute. This is especially prevalent in online meetings, where turning off your camera and ‘hiding’ is easy.