SOCIAL LOAFING AND

SOCIAL FACILITATION
 Social Loafing


Definition: ‘Thetendency to
exert less effort on a task
when working as part of a
cooperative group than when
working on one's own‘ (The
Oxford Dictionary of Psychology)
 Rope-pulling experiment
 Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931)
 Carried out experiments in which different
groups had to pull as hard as they could on a
rope.
 Noted: two individuals only exerted 93% of
their efforts.
 As more individuals pulled on the rope, each
individual exerted themselves less.
Clapping and shouting experiment
 Bibb Latané (1937) demonstrated how groups reduced
individual effort, distinct from coordination loss.
 They blindfolded male college students while making them
wear headphones that masked all noise. They asked them to
shout both in actual groups and pseudo groups.
 Most of them they shouted 82% as intensely as they did alone,
but for five of them effort decreased to 74%.
 Latané et al. concluded that increasing the number of people
in a group diminishes the relative social pressure on each
person.
 “If the individual inputs are not identifiable the person may
work less hard. Thus if the person is dividing up the work to
be performed or the amount of reward he expects to receive,
he will work less hard in groups."
 Meta-analysis study and the Collective
Effort Model (CEM)
 Karau and Williams (in1993) proposed the Collective
Effort Model (CEM), which is used to generate
predictions.
 For studies that examine individual effort in
collective settings.
 Expectancy X Instrumentality X Valence of Outcome
= Motivational Force.
 Social loafing occurs because there is usually a
stronger perceived contingency between individual
effort and valued outcomes when working
individually.
 Value outcomes do not depend on performance.
 Notable findings by Karau and Williams:

 The magnitude of social loafing is reduced for

women and individuals originating from
Eastern cultures.
 Individuals are more likely to loaf when their
co-workers are expected to perform well.
 Individuals reduce social loafing when
working with acquaintances and do not loaf at
all when they work in highly valued groups
 Dealing with social loafing in the
workplace
 Examples of Social Loafing
 The Ringlemann Effect
 Many Hands Make Light the Work

 Causes of Social Loafing

 Lack of commitment from entire team
 Lack of evaluation
 Lack of appreciation
 Lack of belonging
 Forcing projects and assignments on individuals
 Lack of motivation
 Effects of Social Loafing
 Disappointed team members
 Less productive team members
 Loss opportunity for individual talents to surface
 Employee burn out
 Negatively reinforces poor participation and/or
effort
 Preventing Social Loafing
 Develop rules of conduct
 Establish individual accountability
 Encourage group loyalty
 Select complementary team members
 Minimize teams
 Establish ground rules
 Define the task
 Highlight accomplishments and achievements
 Inspect what you Expect
 Dealing with social facilitation in the
workplace
 Cause for decrease in performance –
discomfort of crouding

 Solutions
 Provide options for staff to escape from crowded
conditions (flexible working conditions and shared
spaces)
 Using partitions, private rooms, high –ceilings and
windows to alleviate feelings of crowding.
How to increase the productivity of a team?

 Prevent work groups from getting too large

(i.e., greater than four), unless the task is very
well-learned/simple

 Spaces for group interaction should not use

tables/arrangements that space the
participants too far apart
Schematisation of three
working zones

•collaborative work;
•small teams engaged in
individual work;
•concentrated, solitary tasks.
SOCIAL FACILITATION
 What is Social facilitation?
- that people are more successful at completing
simple, familiar tasks if they are working
within a group or in front of an audience
- people are less successful at completing
complicated, unfamiliar tasks under the same
conditions
 Major theoretical approaches

 Norman Triplett - pioneered research on social

facilitation in 1898

 Floyd Allport - coined the term "social

facilitation" for the first time in 1924

 Professor Robert Zajonc’s drive theory

 Activation theory
 In 1965, Robert Zajonc proposed the first
Activation Theory
 Generalized Drive Hypothesis
 Zajonc’s reasoning was based on Yerkes-
Dodson’s law
 People complete word association tasks alone
and again in the presence of others
 Alertness Hypothesis, the Monitoring
Hypothesis and the Challenge and Threat
Hypothesis
 Evaluation approach
 In 1968, Henchy and Glass proposed the first
 Evaluation Apprehension Hypothesis
 It is not the mere presence of others that
increases individual activation/arousal, but
rather the fear of being evaluated
 Activation increases, not because of fear of
evaluation, but from just the act of being
evaluated, or associating evaluation with a
certain activity
 Attention theories
 In the 1980s, explanations shifted from
Activation Theories to Attention Theories
- Distraction-Conflict Hypothesis
- the Overload Hypothesis
- the Feedback-Loop Model
- the Capacity Model
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUR13BC
SvQA
Thank you for your
attention!