The Social Loafing

Indeed, the group is the appropriate work unit as soon as it is desirable to bring numerous perspectives to bear on a task. Groups can produce both far more and higher-caliber items (especially to complex problems) than independently working folks (see, for example, Shaw, 1981; Wanous & Youtz, 1986).

As groups have turn into a lot more widespread as performance units in organizations, there has been a parallel interest in enhancing productivity by eliminating from these groups individuals "dysfunctional behaviors that interfere in the attainment of desirable interpersonal and career outcomes" (Greenbaum, Kaplan, & Damiano, 1991, p. 127). Numerous models of group effectiveness (see, e.g., Gladstein, 1984; Greenbaum, Kaplan, & Metlay, 1988; Hackman, 1987; McGrath, 1984, 1986; Tubbs, 1984) have drawn from systems theory to specify the various inputs and processes contributing to this kind of desired group outputs as productivity, member satisfaction, and task accomplishment, and the feedback loops by which data about a group's outputs may possibly affect its future inputs and processes. McGrath (1984, 1986) has specially emphasized group process, or group members' interactions in relation to their career and performance situation, as being a keystone to group effectiveness. Indeed, as early as 1972, Steiner noted that technique losses, or faulty coordination of group members' efforts, could compromise group efficiency and effectiveness.

The earlier discussion of perceived dispensability noted that an individual's superiority to co-workers on a conjunctive employment or inferiority to co-workers on the disjunctive employment increased tendency to loaf by heightening one's perception of being superfluous to generating the jobs from the group. Real jobs groups don't always (or even usually) perform tasks on which just one member's contributions determine the entire group's performance. Yet, folks generally compare their abilities with those people of their group members (Goethals & Darley, 1987), and mainly because real groups generate feedback on each member's contributions, members' relative task abilities is going to be discernible in addition to salient.

 

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