In field settings group members (often) show effort gains instead of social loafing

ABSTRACT

Although group work has the potential to both reduce and increase the effort expenditure of its members, effort losses (i.e., reduced effort in group- versus individual work) have long been perceived as (nearly) inevitable in Social Psychology. This notion was elicited, accompanied, and bolstered by (i) pessimistic theorising on group productivity, and (ii) the primary use of laboratory experiments to study effort expenditure in groups. In this contribution, we adopt a more optimistic theoretical perspective. We review a series of consecutive field and vignette studies showing that individuals often work harder in groups than alone (i.e., effort gains in groups). We show that effort gains in groups are robust and can be reliably observed under various theoretically derived conditions. We also illustrate that effort gains in groups cannot be explained by various alternative explanations, and illuminate underlying mechanisms and moderators of effort gains in groups in field settings. We conclude our review by elaborating on the relevance of our findings for current theorising, the motivating design of group work, and new directions in the study of effort expenditure during group work.

KEYWORDS:

• Group work
• teamwork
• motivation
• effort losses
• effort gains

Notes

¹ In accordance with established conventions (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Mathieu et al., 2008), we use the terms

“team” and “group” interchangeably.

² The notion that group members are especially motivated to contribute to the group performance when they see their own performance as indispensable and also perceive a high chance of favourable outcomes for their group is highly similar to the concept of participative efficacy. Participative efficacy is defined as the “[…] the belief that one can make a difference through one’s own contribution to the collective efforts aimed at achieving group goals” (Van Zomeren et al., 2013, p. 619).

³ We will discuss these studies in greater detail in the sections on underlying mechanisms and/or on moderators and boundary conditions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [HU 1772/3-1].