Atl Econ J (2012) 40:437–438

DOI 10.1007/s11293-012-9333-3
ANTHOLOGY

Social Loafers, Free-riders, or Diligent Isolates:

Self-Perceptions in Teamwork

Mikhail Kouliavtsev

Published online: 30 June 2012

# International Atlantic Economic Society 2012

Students complete a group project in an applied business statistics course for 20 % of

their final grade. On the final exam, approximately one week after the completion of the
group project, students are asked to answer two simple questions: 1) write down the full
names of your group members (including your own), and 2) estimate, to the best of your
ability, the percentage of work related to this project that was done by you. I was hoping
to use student answers as input in making slight adjustments to group project grades; for
example, if a student in a group of four claimed to only have done 10 % of the work, and
his teammates agreed (by claiming contributions consistent with his 10 %), his grade
would be lowered by some small amount. Additionally, if it appeared that a student
could not list her teammates’ names, it would serve to support the notion that she
participated relatively little in the group project.
After noting that many groups appeared to have reported totals exceeding 100 %, I
decided to investigate this issue a bit further. The average group size in the class of 42
students was 4.12 with a mode of 4 students. The mean reported contribution by an
individual student was 48.6 %, ranging from 15 to 110 % (surely, a joke). Not surprisingly,
given such high individual claims, the totals for all groups exceeded 100 %. The average
total of all members in a given group was 188.5 %, ranging from 110 to 250 %.
While it is hardly a shock that students tend to inflate their own contribution to
group work, knowing that their grade will probably be affected, it is surprising how
much they inflate it. I fully expected most students—knowing that their teammates
are answering the same questions—to stick to some focal points in their estimates; for
example, a student in a group of four might claim a 20–30 % contribution. That is
unless, of course, there really was some asymmetry in the distribution of workload in
that particular group.
On the “List your teammates” questions, if a student could only recall a first name,
it was counted as 0.5 of a name. The mean number of correctly stated teammates’

M. Kouliavtsev (*)
Department of Economics and Finance, Stephen F. Austin State University, 1936 North St.,
Nacogdoches, TX 75962, USA
e-mail: kouliavtms@sfasu.edu
438 M. Kouliavtsev

names was 3.45 for an average success rate s (proportion of the group accurately
named) of 84 %. I also calculated an adjusted success rate as s×group size/4, which
resulted in a slightly higher mean of 86.3 %. The range of answers here is 1.5 names
(observed in a group of 5) to 5.
Finally, it is interesting if the group’s performance on the project—i.e., their grade—is
in any way related to how its members perceived their workload contributions. I
calculated simple correlations between the (group) project grade and the following
measures: 1) own reported percentage contribution, 2) total (i.e., sum) of all reported
percentages for the group, 3) average of members’ contributions for the given group, and
4) percent correct of teammates’ names. All four correlation coefficients turned out
negative. A simple t-test for the significance of the estimated ρ, given by
rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
n2
t¼r
1  r2
where r is estimated correlation and n042, indicates that only two correlations are
significant (at α00.01): between grade and sum of group reported percentages
(−0.45) and between grade and average (within group) reported percentage (−0.64).
In other words, it appears as though students in groups with lower grades on their
project tend to report doing the greatest share of work, both individually—as indi-
cated by the average—and as a group. One possible explanation is that students who
put more time and effort into the group project have a better grasp of the scope and
volume of work completed and are better able to assess the portion they did
themselves, while students whose groups did little work are not as good at estimating
their share of the contribution.
If the results reported here are indicative of a larger phenomenon—students in groups
systematically and substantially overstate their own contribution to a group project—
anyone interested in understanding group dynamics in teamwork would benefit from
such a study. This would be the next step: to extend the same experiment to larger
populations (in future terms).
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