Project loafing in Projects
Abstract
Collective work, collaboration, and the exchange between individuals are inherent in our society. Those relations are important in all aspects of life: social and professional; and at an early age, people learn the importance of teamwork. Most companies and institutions rely on teamwork and team effort. Most of the time, this strategy is highly successful, but why do so many people don’t like group working? One of the biggest reasons could be a phenomenon called social loafing.
Social loafing is the tendency of people to make less effort when working in a group than when working individually (Latane et al., 1979). There are many reasons why this happens, one example is that individuals tend to loaf when their performance cannot be evaluated (Harkins, 1987). Many experiments were made during the past decades to investigate why, and in which circumstances social loafing occurs. It is a big challenge to project leaders to avoid this behavior in their teams. How to keep a team motivated? How to make people work collectively keeping up the high efficiency and quality of the work delivered?
The article will go through some of the experiments made to investigate social loafing, such as the simple rope-pulling task made by Ringelmann in 1913, to a more complex task that requires concentration from the participants; probable causes why individuals don’t give their best when working in a group; and to conclude, some measurements and actions to prevent social loafing to occur. Avoiding social loafing has considerable importance to project management because this tendency can be detrimental to a project’s success.
1. Social loafing
Social loafing is defined as the reduction of effort and motivation of individuals when working collectively, compared to working by themselves or in coactive work (Williams et al. 1993).
Our society is based on group work: governments, organizations, sports, etc. And the success of the tasks performed by a group depends on many different factors. A project is usually composed of multiple people with different expertise, therefore good group and project management are crucial, and identifying possible problems, such as social loafing, is extremely important.
Many psychologists and researchers realized different experiments to understand why people tend to loaf when working in groups, and what could be done better to improve the overall performance of a group. For Latané, Williams, and Harkins, social loafing could be considered a social “disease” for having “negative consequences for individuals, social institutions, and societies” (Latane et al. 1979).
Experiments tasks inputs
Those experiments involved tasks with different inputs that can be classified as (Williams et al. 1993):
