Coworker ability and effort as determinants of individual effort on a collective task.

Research on social compensation has documented that individuals may actually work harder collectively than individually under some conditions in order to compensate for the expected poor performance of other group members. The present study examined the joint effects of both coworker ability and coworker effort expectations on collective task performance. Participants (N?=?112) worked either coactively or collectively on an idea-generation task with a coworker who was believed to be either high or low on both effort and ability at the task. When group members were paired with a partner who they believed would exert low effort, they (a) compensated when the partner had low ability and (b) loafed when the partner had high ability. Implications of these findings for group research and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of group cohesiveness on social loafing and social compensation.

Individuals often engage in social loafing, exerting less effort on collective rather than individual tasks. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that social loafing can be reduced or eliminated when individuals work in cohesive rather than noncohesive groups. In Experiment 1, secretarial students typed both individually and collectively in simulated word-processing pools composed of either friends or strangers. In Experiment 2, dyads composed of either friends or strangers worked either coactively or collectively on an idea-generation task. Both studies supported the group cohesiveness hypothesis. Experiment 2 also suggested that individuals tend to engage in social compensation when working with coworkers who are low in ability. These findings are discussed in relation to S. J. Karau and K. D. Williams's (1993) Collective Effort Model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Group cohesiveness and social loafing: Effects of a social interaction manipulation on individual motivation within groups.

Previous research has shown that individuals often engage in social loafing, exerting less effort on collective rather than individual tasks. However, nearly all of the prior research has examined noncohesive groups. An experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that social loafing can be reduced or eliminated among cohesive groups. Fifty-nine dyads discussed a controversial issue on which they agreed strongly (high cohesiveness), disagreed strongly (low cohesiveness), or disagreed mildly (control), then worked either coactively or collectively on an idea-generation task. Members of low-cohesiveness and control groups engaged in social loafing, whereas members of high-cohesiveness groups worked just as hard collectively as coactively. These findings are discussed in relation to S. J. Karau and K. D. Williams's (1993) Collective Effort Model of individual motivation in groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in social loafing: Need for cognition as a motivator in collective performance.

Numerous situational factors have been found to moderate the extent to which individuals engage in social loafing, but few studies have investigated the influence of individual differences on individual motivation within groups. The present study examined whether need for cognition, an individual's tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors, moderates social loafing effects. It was predicted that individuals with a high need for cognition would be less likely to loaf on a cognitively engaging task. Individuals with a low need for cognition performed significantly better in the coactive than in the collective condition, whereas individuals with a high need for cognition worked just as hard collectively as coactively. Results were interpreted within the collective effort model (S. J. Karau & K. D. Williams, 1993). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Task design, outcome interdependence, and individual differences: Their joint effects on effort in task-performing teams (Commentary on Huguet et al., 1999).

Analyses of effort problems in groups, like that of P. Huguet, E. Charbonnier, and J.-M. Monteil (see record 1999-13879-004), have implications for how tasks are designed for work teams, how outcomes are distributed, and the complex interrelations between personality characteristics of team members and their response to the work situation. Whereas group members working on uninvolving tasks tend to loaf, when task interdependence is high and the goals are meaningful individuals in groups often expend more rather than less effort. Moreover, whereas the group's outcomes are sometimes determined by the qualities of the individuals in the groups, in other cases the experience of working collectively changes individuals (e.g., individuals who prefer to work alone change to prefer working in groups after experiencing the benefits of working collectively). In consequence, findings about individual differences are often the hardest to apply when making decisions about work group design and composition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration.

Social loafing is the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually. A meta-analysis of 78 studies demonstrates that social loafing is robust and generalizes across tasks and S populations. A large number of variables were found to moderate social loafing. Evaluation potential, expectations of co-worker performance, task meaningfulness, and culture had especially strong influence. These findings are interpreted in the light of a collective effort model that integrates elements of expectancy-value, social identity, and self-validation theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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)     

Pragmatic use of stereotyping in teamwork: Social loafing and compensation as a function of inferred partner–situation fit.

Using 4 experiments, the authors examined how stereotypic information about teammates influences social loafing and compensation during collective tasks. In each experiment, participants performed better on cognitive tasks when there was a poor (vs. good) fit between the stereotypic strengths of their partner and the requirements of the task. This pattern. occurred whether participants used gender stereotypes (Experiment 1) or occupational stereotypes (Experiments 2 to 4) and occurred even when participants only anticipated working on a collective task (Experiment 4). In Experiment 3, the pattern occurred only in the collective (not in the coactive) condition, providing direct evidence for social loafing. Together, these results suggest that people use stereotypes to tune their motivation to optimize the ratio of their own individual effort to the team's expected output. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Protestant work ethic moderates social loafing.

Prior research on social loafing has emphasized situational factors and has largely neglected personality influences. The current study attempted to close this gap by exploring the potential for Protestant work ethic (PWE) to reduce or eliminate social loafing. Individuals who had been pretested on PWE were asked to work either coactively or collectively on an idea generation task. As predicted, PWE moderated the effects of work condition on individual effort such that PWE scores were negatively associated with social loafing. These results highlight the potential importance of personality influences on group motivation and suggest that individuals with a strong personal work ethic are unlikely to engage in social loafing. Implications for theory and future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intuitions about situational correction in self and others.

People's attributional phenomenology is likely to be characterized by effortful situational correction. Drawing on this phenomenology and on people's desire to view themselves more favorably than others, the authors hypothesized that people expect others to engage in less situational correction than themselves and to make more extreme dispositional attributions for constrained actors' behavior. In 2 studies, people expected their peers to make more extreme dispositional inferences than they did themselves for a situationally constrained actor's behavior. People's expectation that they engage in more situational correction than their peers was diminished among Japanese participants, who have less desire to view themselves as superior to their peers (Study 3), and among participants who were led to view dispositional attributions more favorably than situational attributions (Study 4). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social Exclusion Impairs Self-Regulation.

Six experiments showed that being excluded or rejected caused decrements in self-regulation. In Experiment 1, participants who were led to anticipate a lonely future life were less able to make themselves consume a healthy but bad-tasting beverage. In Experiment 2, some participants were told that no one else in their group wanted to work with them, and these participants later ate more cookies than other participants. In Experiment 3, excluded participants quit sooner on a frustrating task. In Experiments 4-6, exclusion led to impairment of attention regulation as measured with a dichotic listening task. Experiments 5 and 6 further showed that decrements in self-regulation can be eliminated by offering a cash incentive or increasing self-awareness. Thus, rejected people are capable of self-regulation but are normally disinclined to make the effort. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The eureka error: Inadvertent plagiarism by misattributions of effort.

The authors found that the feeling of authorship for mental actions such as solving problems is enhanced by effort cues experienced during mental activity; misattribution of effort cues resulted in inadvertent plagiarism. Pairs of participants took turns solving anagrams as they exerted effort on an unrelated task. People inadvertently plagiarized their partners' answers more often when they experienced high incidental effort while working on the problem and reduced effort as the solution appeared. This result was found for efforts produced when participants squeezed a handgrip during the task (Experiment 1) or when the anagram was displayed in a font that was difficult to read (Experiments 2, 3a, and 3b). Plagiarism declined, however, when participants attended to the source of the effort cues (Experiments 3a and 3b). These results suggest that effort misattribution can influence authorship processing for mental activities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributions of responsibility for group tasks: The egocentric bias and the actor–observer difference.

In each of 3 experiments it was demonstrated that under certain conditions individuals who work on a task in a dyad will tend to attribute greater responsibility for a positive outcome to their partners than to themselves. In Exp I 56 college students, who had qualifying scores on the Beck Depression Inventory, working in dyads on a crossword puzzle attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves for an outcome they were led to believe was quite good, thus contradicting the expected "egocentric bias" effect. This was true across depression categories. In Exp II, 100 college students working in dyads on the puzzle attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves for a positive outcome when asked immediately after the task to make the attribution. However, Ss attributed greater responsibility to themselves than to their partners when asked to make the attribution 3 days later, thus replicating the egocentric bias effect. Half of the 30 dyads in Exp III believed they were being videotaped while working on the puzzle, whereas the other half did not. "Videotaped" Ss attributed more responsibility for the positive outcome to themselves than to their partners, whereas the nonvideotaped Ss attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves when both groups were asked to give their attributions immediately after the task. The relationship between the egocentric bias effect and the actor–observer difference phenomenon is discussed. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 35(3) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (see record 2009-05251-016). An incorrect figure was printed due to an error in the production process. The correct version of Figure 1b is provided in the correction.] Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of language group was different for each type of task: Monolinguals and bilinguals performed similarly on working memory tasks, monolinguals performed better on lexical retrieval tasks, and bilinguals performed better on executive control tasks, with some evidence for larger language group differences in older participants on the executive control tasks. These results replicate findings from individual studies obtained using only 1 type of task and different participants. The confirmation of this pattern in the same participants is discussed in terms of a suggested explanation of how the need to manage 2 language systems leads to these different outcomes for cognitive and linguistic functions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do People Agree About the Causes of Behavior? A Social Relations Analysis of Behavior Ratings and Causal Attributions.

Two studies examined consistency and agreement in behavior ratings and causal attributions. In Study 1, participants (N = 280) engaged in a series of getting-acquainted conversations in one of 3 communication media (face-to-face, telephone, computer mediated); in Study 2, participants (N = 120) engaged in a competitive group task. In both studies, participants rated themselves and their interaction partners on a set of behaviors and then made attributions about the causes of those behaviors. The major findings were that (a) participants consistently favored some causal factors over others in explaining both their own and their partners' behavior, supporting the existence of generalized attributional styles; and (b) participants showed moderate self-partner and partner-partner agreement about behavior but virtually no agreement about the causes of behavior. Thus, in brief interactions people tend to see themselves and others through the lens of their stable patterns of perceiving and interpreting behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing approach motivation in the avoidance behavior of others: Implications for an understanding of pluralistic ignorance.

Four studies tested the hypothesis that observers tend to interpret others' actions as approach motivated even when they recognize that their own identical choices were motivated by avoidance. Study 1 found that voters in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election who chose a candidate primarily because of their aversion to the alternative thought that others who voted for the same candidate liked him more than they themselves did. In Studies 2, 3, and 4 participants who learned that others made the same choice as themselves between 2 unappealing flavors of soda or jelly beans estimated that the others would pay more than they would for their common choice. The relevance of these findings for an understanding of pluralistic ignorance is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Increasing productivity and decreasing time limits: A field replication of Parkinson's law.

Attempted a field replication of J. F. Bryan and E. A. Locke's (see record 1967-15919-001) general version of Parkinson's Law (i.e., effort is adjusted to the difficulty of the task). The principle implies greater effort on a given task when time restrictions are placed on task completion than when there are no such restrictions. As predicted, members of logging crews (N = 379) showed a significantly higher rate of output when limited to mill deliveries on 1 or 2 days/wk than when no such buying restrictions were in effect. Since both owners and crew members were paid on a piece-rate basis, there was an incentive to maximize production early when restrictions were operative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On being cool and collected: Mood regulation in anticipation of social interaction.

This study examined the influence of anticipated social interaction on the regulation of moods. Study 1 induced happy and sad moods through exposure to music. All participants expected to perform a second, unrelated experimental task either by themselves or with another participant. Participants who expected to do the task alone subsequently selected positive and negative news stories equally, but those who expected to interact preferred stories containing material incongruent with their mood. Study 2 confirmed this outcome, but showed it was confined primarily to anticipation of interaction with partners who are expected to be in neutral or good moods themselves. In Study 3, participants whose mood was not manipulated reduced self-exposure to cheerful or depressing videos when they expected to interact with another. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Satiated with belongingness? Effects of acceptance, rejection, and task framing on self-regulatory performance.

Seven experiments showed that the effects of social acceptance and social exclusion on self-regulatory performance depend on the prospect of future acceptance. Excluded participants showed decrements in self-regulation, but these decrements were eliminated if the self-regulation task was ostensibly a diagnostic indicator of the ability to get along with others. No such improvement was found when the task was presented as diagnostic of good health. Accepted participants, in contrast, performed relatively poorly when the task was framed as a diagnostic indicator of interpersonally attractive traits. Furthermore, poor performance among accepted participants was not due to self-handicapping or overconfidence. Offering accepted participants a cash incentive for self-regulating eliminated the self-regulation deficits. These findings provide evidence that the need to belong fits standard motivational patterns: Thwarting the drive intensifies it, whereas satiating it leads to temporary reduction in drive. Accepted people are normally good at self-regulation but are unwilling to exert the effort to self-regulate if self-regulation means gaining the social acceptance they have already obtained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)