GROUP COLLABORATION & LEADERSHIP INTERVENTION
SOCIAL LOAFING
By Ruth Pauline Wachter Successful group collaboration requires leaders to provide clear structure, targets, and support to reduce the risk of group unproductiveness. Employees understand that group collaboration enables them to improve their productivity, but social researchers do not support this expectation. The present paper debunks the issue of social loafing at work and provides intervention for leaders. Group collaboration was continuously developed and improved in the scope of business management theories for quite a long time. Whether in the economy, politics, or sports, collective decisions are made together, and collaborative performance is provided in groups consisting of individual tasks, behavior, and attitude. The principal part of group tasks is often a sum of individual tasks combined into a University of Liverpool
group result. Professor Edgar Pierce stresses, ”I have no question that a team can generate magic. But don’t count on it” (Coutu, D., 2009, p. 3). Hackman (2002) documents that, on the one side, group leaders often do not provide explicit directions or even structures; on the other hand, they over-manager their team without having a rest. The focus of the study is to provide a shared understanding of the difficulties of group collaboration and the risk performance and outcome. The central question to be examined in this paper is why social loafing is that risky for companies and how leaders could support decreasing the risk and increasing performance and motivation. While examining group dynamics and attitudes in greater detail would be interesting, this study has a different objective.
Social Loafing & Collaboration Long ago, humans had to form social groups for hunting and surviving (Talfinger, 1996). Following Alvard (2012), human collaboration starts with stage hunting. All participants anticipate a more significant benefit from hunting a stag than hares that hunters can do alone. In addition, the use of collaboration needs to be greater than those of solo hunting. For the first time, Ringelman (1913) asks himself about the influence of teamwork on group performance. He argues that each participant performs
SOCIAL LOAFING IS THE REDUCTION OF INDIVIDUAL EFFORT THAT OCCURS WHEN PEOPLE WORK IN GROUPS COMPARED TO WHEN THEY WORK ALONE.
MSC Applied Psychology