Social Compensation

Definition

Social compensation refers to the phenomenon that individuals increase their effort on a collective task (compared with how hard they try when working individually) to compensate for the anticipated poor performance of other group members. People are more likely to compensate when they think their coworkers are not going to perform well and when the outcomes of the group performance are perceived to be important.

Background and History

Many of life's most important tasks can be accomplished only in groups, and many group tasks require the pooling of individual members' inputs. Government task forces, sports teams, organizational committees, juries, and quality control teams are good examples of groups that combine individual efforts to form a single product. Social psychologists have always been interested in whether individual motivation, effort, and productivity are influenced by working in groups. Indeed, the first experiments in social psychology dealt with these very issues, including Norman Triplett's work showing motivation gains when performing alongside other performing individuals, and Max Ringelmann's demonstration of motivation losses when men collectively pulled on a rope. Research in the late 1960s and early 1970s consistently found that individuals tried harder on tasks when they were in the presence of others (who could be either coworkers or audience members), and this effect was referred to as social facilitation. Trying harder meant doing better on easy, well-learned tasks, but doing worse on novel or difficult tasks. Research in the 1970s and 1980s tended to find robust motivation losses, a phenomenon known as social loafing. The major difference between social facilitation and social loafing was that with social facilitation, individuals were working in the evaluative presence of [Page 890]others, but in social loafing, they were working on tasks in which they shared contributions with the others. As a result, the presence of others implied less evaluation. Still to be demonstrated, however, were conditions in which individuals would work harder when working collectively than when they worked individually. Lay theories focus on esprit de corps, in which individuals working in collective groups are infused with team spirit and work harder than they do individually; however, there is little evidence that this occurs. At best, highly cohesive teams were simply less likely to loaf.

But consider a classroom situation in which a teacher divides a class into small groups in which each group works on a project for which they share a grade. Social loafing occurs in this type of situation, but under what conditions would a student feel especially obligated to compensate for others?

When People Compensate

For social compensation to occur, two criteria must be satisfied. The first is that individuals must, for some reason, distrust their fellow coworkers to put forth an acceptable contribution to the group task. This can happen several ways. Some individuals are chronically distrustful of others, feeling they cannot rely on others to do their part. Research has shown that those low in interpersonal trust are more likely to compensate on a collective task. Ironically, hightrusting individuals seem most likely to take advantage of a collective task and let others do most of the work. Distrust can also develop when individuals suspect that their coworkers do not intend to exert much effort on the collective task. Social compensation is likely to occur when coworkers indicate their lack of intended effort. Finally, individuals are more likely to socially compensate when they are led to believe their coworkers lack the ability to do well on the collective task.

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