Social Compensation

Background

Tasks are often completed in groups, such as committees, sports teams, juries, marching bands, and quality control teams. Numerous tasks are completed collectively, in that an individual's contributions are pooled with the contributions of coworkers to form a single outcome, such as a decision, a score (in a sports game), a musical performance, or an inspected product. Some of the earliest social-psychological research investigated how groups work together to complete a task. Social psychologists were particularly interested in how working in groups affects the motivation, effort, and productivity of individuals.

In early research on this topic, Max Ringelmann wanted to understand why, when he added a second ox to a team pulling a plow, the plowing did not get done twice as fast. Ringelmann explored this issue by studying the performance of men pulling on a rope. He found there was a loss of motivation when the men collectively pulled on the rope, compared with when they pulled as hard as they could individually. He speculated that this reduction of individual effort on a collective task was merely an artifact of coordination problems and was not psychological in nature.

However, researchers in the 1970s found that when lack of coordination was ruled out, social loafing remained a robust psychological phenomenon. Social loafing occurs when individuals expend less effort collectively, when the outcome is dependent on how everyone performs, than they do coactively, when individuals work by themselves but in the presence of others. Social loafing can be reduced or eliminated through several means, such as increasing the identifiability or evaluability of the individual members' contributions, enhancing personal involvement with the task, elevating the uniqueness of individual contributions, or strengthening group cohesiveness.

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