Effects of personal involvement: Thought-provoking implications for social loafing.

In previous research, the 2nd author and colleagues (see record 1980-30335-001) observed that individuals working together put out less effort than when they work alone; this phenomenon was termed social loafing (SL). Subsequent research by these authors (see record 1981-32831-001) suggested that SL arises, at least in part, because when participants work with others on tasks their individual outputs are lost in the crowd, and, thus, they can receive neither credit nor blame for their performance. The possibility that personal involvement in a task could moderate the SL effect was tested in the present experiment, which used a 2 (high/low involvement)?×?2 (high/low identifiability) factorial design across 3 replications with 224 undergraduates. The task involved thoughts generated in response to a counterattitudinal proposal. Replicating previous SL research, present results show that under conditions of low involvement, Ss whose outputs were identifiable worked harder than those whose outputs were pooled. However, when the task was personally involving, the SL effect was eliminated: Ss whose outputs were pooled worked as hard as those whose individual outputs could be identified. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)