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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to challenge the assumption that process losses of individuals working in teams are unavoidable. The paper aims to challenge this assumption on the basis of social identity theory and recent research. Design/methodology/approach: The approach adopted in this paper is to review the mainstream literature providing strong evidence for motivation problems of individuals working in groups. Based on more recent literature, innovative ways to overcome these problems are discussed. Findings: A social identity-based analysis and recent findings summarized in this paper show that social loafing can be overcome and that even motivation gains in group work can be expected when groups are important for the individual group members' self-concepts. Practical implications: The paper provides human resource professionals and front-line managers with suggestions as to how individual motivation and performance might be increased when working in teams. Originality/value ? The paper contributes to the literature by challenging the existing approach to reducing social loafing, i.e. individualizing workers as much as possible, and proposes a team-based approach instead to overcome motivation problems.
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Do many hands make light work?
How to overcome social loafing and gain
motivation in work teams
Rolf van Dick
Department of Social Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Goethe University,
Frankfurt, Germany
Patrick A. Tissington
Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, and
Guido Hertel
Psychologie III-Organisations psychologie, University of Mu
¨nster,
Mu
¨nster, Germany
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to challenge the assumption that process losses of individuals
working in teams are unavoidable. The paper aims to challenge this assumption on the basis of social
identity theory and recent research.
Design/methodology/approach The approach adopted in this paper is to review the mainstream
literature providing strong evidence for motivation problems of individuals working in groups. Based
on more recent literature, innovative ways to overcome these problems are discussed.
Findings A social identity-based analysis and recent findings summarized in this paper show that
social loafing can be overcome and that even motivation gains in group work can be expected when
groups are important for the individual group members’ self-concepts.
Practical implications – The paper provides human resource professionals and front-line
managers with suggestions as to how individual motivation and performance might be increased
when working in teams.
Originality/value – The paper contributes to the literature by challenging the existing approach to
reducing social loafing, i.e. individualizing workers as much as possible, and proposes a team-based
approach instead to overcome motivation problems.
Keywords Team working, Motivation (psychology), Employee behaviour
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction: teamwork is popular but is it a good idea?
Most of today’s organizations use work groups and teams to get things done. The
argument for having employees working in teams is that it is more efficient because of
“synergy effects” and that it is also more fun for the employees. However, many people
are now questioning whether teamwork really is as effective as it often is announced to
be, and under what circumstances do the predicted synergetic effects occur? An
enormous number of empirical studies have been carried out for over more than three
decades which repeatedly demonstrated that, when working in groups, individuals
typically fall short of their usual performance shown when working alone. In other
words, when individuals come together and work in a group, that group’s performance
is often lower than the expected average or sum (depending on the task) of the
individuals’ performance. This has been observed in physical tasks like rope-pulling or
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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Do many hands
make light work?
233
Received September 2008
Revised January 2009
Accepted February 2009
European Business Review
Vol. 21 No. 3, 2009
pp. 233-245
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0955-534X
DOI 10.1108/09555340910956621
shouting (Latane
´et al., 1979), as well as for cognitive tasks such as the generation of
new ideas in brainstorming groups (Diehl, 1991; Diehl and Stroebe, 1987). The effect is
most prominent in additive tasks where the group performance is composed of the sum
of the individuals’ efforts such as rope pulling or group brainstorming.
In general, these problems of performing groups can be traced back to two kinds of
problems:
(1) difficulties of coordination between group members, when, for instance, not all
group members on one end of the rope pull at the same moment; and
(2) a decrease in their motivation.
For the motivational losses, several reasons have been proposed and studied. Free
riding occurs because team members think that their personal efforts are not really
necessary because the team will reach its objectives anyway due to other members’
work. Such a behavior is rational when the team member’s perception is correct and
her/his contribution is not really needed. However, when a team member’s perception
is incorrect and her/his contribution is in fact quite necessary for the team’s progress,
free riding is detrimental not only because the contribution of this team member is
lacking but also due to spreading negative effects on the motivation of the other team
members. The sucker effect describes a reaction to the observation of an individual
that other team members appear to be free riding. As a consequence, the individual
reduces her/his effort because she or he does not want to be exploited. Social anxiety
reduces effectiveness because team members are anxious about what their fellow team
members might think about them. Soldiering describes the reduction of effort of most
or all team members in protest at a (perceived) unfair treatment, particularly by
managers or supervisors. The term has been derived from soldiers marching
particularly slowly when they dislike their officer. However, the effect that has
attracted the most research attention is social loafing. This problem occurs because
group members think their individual inputs in a group work cannot be identified.
Meta-analyses (i.e. summaries across dozens of studies) reveal that this effect is quite
robust and leads to underperformance of teams (Rutte, 2003; West et al., 2004) that
translates into substantial productivity losses (Karau and Williams, 1993).
Taylor (1911, p. 72; see Haslam, 2004) summarized his observations as follows:
Careful analysis [...] demonstrated the fact that when workmen are herded together in gangs,
each man in the gang becomes far less efficient than when his personal ambition is
stimulated; that when men work in gangs their efficiency falls almost invariably down to or
below the level of the worst man in the gang; and that they are pulled down instead of being
elevated by being herded together.
The solution that was proposed by Taylor at the time was either to dissolve groups
wherever possible and have employees working individually, or to use
problem-solving techniques that encourage them to work on their own within the
group (Thompson, 2003). This solution is repeatedly put forward by consultants and
researchers alike. For instance, to increase performance in idea generation tasks, it has
been suggested to have nominal groups (i.e. having individuals generating ideas first
alone before discussing them in the larger group) instead of real groups, to exchange
group members between teams regularly to increase innovation, or to use electronic
brainstorming with reduced interaction between team members. In essence, most of
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these techniques are aimed at individualizing the team members. For some tasks, such
as brainstorming, these suggestions are indeed helpful and it has been shown that
nominal brainstorming groups are more effective in terms of quantity and quality of
the ideas produced than real groups (Diehl and Stroebe, 1987; Diehl, 1991). As
teamwork expert and Harvard scholar Richard Hackman put it, allocating nine women
to be pregnant for a month each does not produce a baby there are clearly tasks that
do not require teamwork (Hackman, 2004).
However, we believe that abolishing team working by designing work tasks for
individuals is far from being the only possible solution to these motivation problems.
Moreover, there are many benefits of team working that cannot be replaced by
employees working individually. Compared to individual workers, teams are more
flexible and more innovative due to multiple perspectives, can generate and store
knowledge more effectively, and are better equipped to respond fast to changes in task
requirements and market conditions (West et al., 2004; West, 2004; West and
Markiewicz, 2004). Organizations more and more rely on team related pay – particularly
firms with eastern cultural backgrounds (e.g. Chinese or Taiwanese companies, see
Chang et al., 2007). Moreover, human beings whether on the shop floor or in
management positions usually prefer working together rather than alone, and teams
serve this need for affiliation and belonging much better than the organization as a
whole (Riketta and van Dick, 2005). Belonging to teams has always been a key issue for
survival in a hostile environment and in the early days of mankind teams were almost
certainly crucial for to the maintenance of important background resources such as
shelter and in more modern times to support for one’s own career/well-being. Thus,
teams provide important psychological resources for employees that are often
maintained via reciprocity processes and these can include productivity gains.
Teamwork can be successful!
Thus, we believe that teams can be successful devices to enhance individual’s motivation
and to create innovation. In the following sections, we will discuss strategies to overcome
motivational losses and to make teamwork as successful as it potentially can be. These
strategies are quite different from the above suggestions of individuating employees and
stress rather than minimize the “teamness” of working in groups. We believe that the
strategies suggested here can pave the way for a more sustainable increase of effective,
efficient and creative team working in organizations. Our arguments evolve directly
from the same meta-analyses cited above which revealed an overall tendency of the
individual towards social loafing. However, the spectrum of empirical findings is large
ranging from strong support for the loafing hypothesis to contrasting results of higher
performance in teams apparently as a result of the team environment creating increased
individual effort. This large variation in empirical findings is due to different factors
being studied. We will discuss two of these factors in more detail now.
The first factor is the valence, or personal meaning of the group outcomes for the
individual. It has been demonstrated that groups in which members place low or
moderate valence on the team goals indeed foster loafing in its members whereas for
groups in which members place high valence on the team goals, the opposite effect
(i.e. more effort) has been observed (Karau and Williams, 1993). The second important
factor is the setting of the studies included in the meta-analytical overviews. Here, it
has been shown that experiments with school, college or university students reveal the
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expected loafing effects whereas studies in settings with organizational employees as
participants demonstrate that social loafing can be reduced when working collectively
as opposed to working individually (Erez and Somech, 1996). This increased effort due
to a motivation to enhance the collective outcome has been coined as social laboring
(Haslam, 2004). Figure 1 shows the contrasting effects.
Figure 1 shows the results of the above-mentioned meta-analytical evidence of
social loafing versus social laboring effects. The baseline refers to, for instance, three
individuals working on their own, e.g. pulling separately on ropes. If these three
individuals are now told, as in typical social loafing research, that their combined
efforts are taken as a group “product” (i.e. the strength of them pulling on one rope
together), one would usually find that the sum or average performance falls behind
what would have been expected by combining the individual performances. Thus,
1þ1þ1 does not necessarily equal 3 but, due to loafing effects, often equals 2.5 or
even less. However, if the group and its outcomes are meaningful to the individuals, we
argue that 1 þ1þ1 can even equal 4 or more because individuals put in even more
effort compared to working alone because of a motivation gain and social laboring.
Together, it would seem that the crucial factor in an individual’s reduced motivation
is not whether they work in a team or not, but whether the team they work in provides
any meaning to them. We will flesh this proposition out a little bit by summarizing
findings of empirical studies in different settings.
Team success depends on the meaning the team has for its members
There are, in principle, four ways of making the group meaningful to the individual
group member. First of all, groups that have a joint history and even more
importantly expect a common future can be thought of being of greater relevance for
its members (e.g. existing work groups rather than artificially created lab groups;
groups of friends rather than strangers). Second, a common goal that goes above and
beyond the concrete task will lead to higher valence and meaning (e.g. the long-term
goal to become the most successful sales team in the company). Third, the
organizational context can increase the salience of the group membership, e.g. through
Figure 1.
Illustration of social
loafing versus social
laboring effects of
performance
Baseline
Social laboring
Social loafing
Working in a
group
Working
individually
Performance
Low valence/
meaning
High valence/
meaning
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inter-group benchmarking. Finally, individuals might differ in their personal
preferences for working in groups and therefore in their disposition to be committed
to the group’s objectives. We will briefly present the evidence for the effectiveness of
these mechanisms and then discuss the psychological reasons why these mechanisms
are effective. Finally, we will outline how practitioners can make use of these
mechanisms by using specific forms of teambuilding and other strategies.
Various researchers have investigated problems of motivation losses in groups
from a social identity perspective (van Dick et al., 2009; van Dick, 2004; Worchel et al.,
1998). These studies tested the assumption that process losses might be overcome
through manipulation of the personal significance of the group. The researchers
formulated the hypothesis that individuals would increase their productivity in groups
under conditions that make the group an important component of their identity.
So, where the individual was personally aligned with the group, they would expend
more effort in group tasks and therefore the productivity of the group would increase.
The findings confirmed this hypothesis and showed particular effects when meaning
of the group was increased by having another group present with which the group
could be compared. This team benchmarking increased the meaning of the group
through the immediate ability to compare “us” with “them.” When social comparison is
used not only on the individual but also on the team level, we believe that this can be a
very promising approach to the reduction of social loafing. Indeed, 90 years ago, a
German researcher demonstrated that working as a member of a group that competes
against another group can lead to higher performance compared to individual
performance (Moede, 1914). In a similar way, van Dick et al. (2009) demonstrated
higher group performance as a consequence of team comparison (as a form of
benchmarking) in line with the assumptions. However, both studies suffer from
shortcomings in that the groups performed their tasks in artificial laboratory
environments. Therefore, some would argue that it might be difficult to transfer the
effect directly to existing teams in organizations. However, the social meaning of the
groups in the laboratory study should be less pronounced as participants were
conscious of the limited nature of the study. Given the fact that still productivity gains
were observed due to the presence of another group suggests that these effects might
be even stronger in business settings with existing groups. Indeed, the idea that
competition with another group leads to better performance has also been corroborated
by field research. A team of researchers in Israel investigated the effects of group
competition on productivity (Bornstein and Erev, 1997; Erev et al., 1993). They
designed a study of orange pickers, where pickers were organized in three different
ways. In the personal condition, a group of four pickers placed all their picked oranges
in their own section of the container and each group member was paid according to
their own crop. In the team condition, teams of four picked into a common container
and all team members were paid according to the total picked. In the final condition,
the competitive condition, each team of four was split into two pairs and each pair was
allocated one-half of a divided container. An additional reward was given to the pair
who picked more and the amount of oranges picked was the performance measure. The
results confirmed all of the researchers’ predictions showing that simply assigning
individual pickers to teams and rewarding them on the basis of the team product led to
an average of 280 kilograms of picked oranges compared to an average of 376
kilograms for four pickers that were in the personal condition. This is a nice illustration
Do many hands
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237
of how motivation losses can look like in practice. In the competitive condition, there
was a clear production advantage of with an increase of performance over time. So, this
study shows a translation from findings from lab-based game playing studies to an
environment more similar to that found in everyday work conditions. However, this
study also has shortcomings when trying to generalize findings to work-a-day
experience and the study took place over a period of only 40 minutes. Yet, there was a
more marked effect after 40 than after 20 minutes, indicating that the effects might
increase with time and that it is possible that long-tenure teams might see an enhanced
effect rather than a decreased one over time.
So what happens to groups whosemembers know each other well and aretogether for
more than a 40 minutes experiment? Another study has addressed this question and
investigated the performance differences between groups whose members knew each
other compared to those who did not (Jehn and Shah, 1997). This study aimed not only
to quantify performance differences but also to map the group processes at play in order
to understand the underlying causes of any performance difference. The results
showed that groups of friends outperformed groups of strangers. Furthermore, the
research revealed that the reason for better performance was that friendship groups
communicated more, provided more encouragement to each other, and were more
committed to the performance of the task – and to each other than the groups of
strangers. In terms of the study’s relation to realism, there are elements of artificiality in
one of the tasks performed by participants (making models) and also elements
of real workplace tasks (sifting job applications). Moreover, the participants were
students – albeit on a business course. With these caveats in mind, the study does
indicate the importance of individual commitment level to the team. In this case, we would
argue that the friendship groups were not performing well because they were friends, but
because they were in a group of friends that made the members more closely identified
with the team, therefore more committed to it, and therefore more motivated and less
affected by the negative social factors described earlier.
A final study that is relevant in this context has looked into dispositional effects of
group loyalty are some people more likely to act as team players than others?
Researchers have carried out a series of studies into the effects of loyalty and
discovered positive correlations between group loyalty and commitment to the
organization and involvement in university activities among university students
(James and Cropanzano, 1994). Furthermore, loyalty was also found to be correlated to
a lower likelihood of dropping out of university and a high likelihood of recommending
the university. Perhaps, the finding of most interest to executives will be the consistent
relationship between loyalty and performance. This is especially true when a group is
able to compare itself with another similar group, indicating that some sense of
connection to the group engendered a spirit of competition and spurred the group on to
higher levels of performance. At its most simple level, this appears to be unsurprising
since these are phenomena (i.e. encouragement to inter-group competition) most
westerners first encounter at school and which continue through further education and
into the workplace. As mentioned earlier, research with school children conducted
already 90 years ago has demonstrated that working as a member of a group that
competes against another group can lead to higher performance compared to mere
interpersonal competition or individual performance (Moede, 1914).
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In spite of the positive evidence for the motivating effects of team benchmarking, it
should be kept in mind that such a strategy is not without risk and problems (Fincham,
2000; Seta, 1982; Jones and Thwaites, 2000). Indeed, while team benchmarking has
positive effects for the performance and cohesion within a team, its sometimes divisive
nature might lead teams to sabotage each other in order to “win” the competition. This in
turn would lead to an overall loss for the company as because teams would not support
or share necessary information with members of other teams, or destroy mutual
resources once the own team had used them. Another risk of team benchmarking is that
collusion between the teams to share the bonus on a rotating basis might take place so
that no overall motivating effect occurs. Thus, when implementing team benchmarking,
managers have to keep an eye on how the relationships between the teams develop. One
promising strategy to address problems due to destructive com petition between teams is
to foster not only the identification with the team but also the identification with the
overarching company (van Dick et al., 2008).
After discussing evidence that making teamwork more meaningful for the team
members can reduce motivation losses significantly, we now review some of the
research in more detail, demonstrating how one can trigger motivation levels in teams
that even exceed the effort people show in the same task when working alone. The
psychological mechanisms underlying these “motivation gains” are again related to a
high valence of the team. Social compensation effects have been demonstrated with
student groups performing brainstorming tasks in a series of experiments (Williams
and Karau, 1991). When the expected performance of co-workers was rather poor
(either due to low capability or low motivation), team members were willing to
compensate this poor partner performance by increasing their own efforts even when
this extra-performance was not identifiable or acknowledged by others. The resulting
performance gain of the compensating person was about 40 percent higher than a
non-team control condition. However, a precondition for this motivation gain was that
the team outcome was highly valued by the compensating team member. In conditions
where the team outcome was only moderately valued, no motivation gain occurred.
Social indispensability effects as the second mechanism that can trigger motivation
gains in groups were first documented by a German researcher interested in
maximizing the performance of rowing teams over 80 years ago (Ko
¨hler, 1926). Recent
replications of this mechanism have revealed that the underlying psychological
process is often based on feelings that the rest of the team highly depends on ones own
personal contribution. In a series of experimental studies, team members showed
increased performance levels of up to 50 percent during teamwork compared to
working alone in order not to let their partners down (Weber and Hertel, 2007).
Moreover, these additional efforts were correlated with increased enjoyment of the task
(Hertel et al., 2003a). Although it is obvious that such motivation gain is stronger the
more a person values a team and cares for its members, the mechanism is robust
enough to be demonstrated already in short-term teams with rather low meaning for its
members. For instance, in a computer-based simulation of a retail store, participants
revealed motivation gains compared to working alone even though their team partner
was not visible or known to them (Hertel et al., 2003a, b). Building on these lab results, a
recent field study with existing virtual teams in two business organizations has
demonstrated that the average experience of indispensability within a team explained
large parts of variation of team effectiveness (Hertel et al., 2004). Together, these results
Do many hands
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not only provide thorough process explanations on how high-team valence and
perceived importance of personal contributions might translate into process gains of
teams, but also entail concrete suggestions for executives to set the stage for such
motivation gains. While the two discussed mechanisms of motivation gains in groups
are good examples for triggering factors that are already well-replicated and
understood, even more triggering factors might exist that still await systematic
research (Hertel, 2000). Among them is interpersonal comparison or competition within
teams which can also increase team members’ performance motivation compared to
working alone although this gain might come with the risk of decreases in team
cohesion and trust in the long run (Stanne et al., 1999). Group goal setting is another
promising tactic which has already been demonstrated to lead to extra efforts in teams,
particularly when goals are specified both at the team level and at the individual level
so that both types of goals complement each other (Crown and Rosse, 1995).
What makes the difference?
All the studies summarized above clearly demonstrate that social loafing is not inevitable
but can be prevented by using appropriate strategies. Moreover, there are even some
mechanisms which may lead group members to put in extra effort on behalf of the groups’
goals in excess of their regular (individual) performance. First and foremost, the groups
have to provide some meaning for the individual. At the workplace, this should generally
be the case when individuals work together in a team for a complete project and frequently
this is a periodof several years.Strategies to make the team salient for the team members
are, for example symbols (logos, etc.) and common office space. Strategies to stress the
meaning of a team include appropriate goal setting (common goals) and team-based
incentives contingent to these goals. Second, tasks in the workplace usually are
meaningful to the teams carrying out these tasks – whether it is fixing wheels to a car’s
body on an assembly line or performing heart transplantation in a surgery team. This task
meaning or significance can replace or compensate for low meaning of the group, for
instance in cases when strangers come together to make a team – such as in civil aviation
when flight crews assemble for a flight and then disperse or when a group is assembled to
carry out panel interviews. Indeed, in teams of software developers that voluntarily
contribute to “open source” projects on the internet (e.g. Linux and Mozilla), valence of the
project together with perceived personal importance for the success of the project are
crucial predictors of the high-voluntary engagement shown (Hertel et al., 2003b). Third, the
significance of the group for individual group members can be further increased by
comparison with competing groups. Fourth, increasing the interdependence within teams
together with appropriate feedback will strengthen the feeling that the personal
contribution of each team member is indispensable and thus lead to additional effort on
behalf of the team in order not to let colleagues down. Finally, looking for team members
who are more likely to be loyal and to identify with the group’s goals seems to increase
performance on top of the meaningfulness and salience of the team in a given context.
What managers can do!
Organizations have been trying to achieve better results through teamwork for some
time and many have invested in team building exercises or programs of one form or
another with the aim of achieving the synergies expected from the concept of teams.
Such training has had mixed success (Salas et al., 1999): some programs contained
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more style than substance, and in some cases organizational structure and culture do
not really support teamwork. However, in many cases the concept has proved to be
highly successful. In making these recommendations, we have assumed that readers
will have already undertaken a degree of team training and the interventions described
here are designed to be carried out in addition to such training.
Select team members partly on the basis of team disposition
Select teams partially on the basis of dispositional group loyalty such that all teams
have similar high levels of group loyalty. The effect of bringing together individuals
potentially loyal to the team may not be very strong on its own but provides a
necessary pre-condition for team viability and for achieving the positive effects of the
other strategies discussed. If this is not feasible, measure dispositional loyalty and
target low-scoring teams for development. Development takes the form of making the
links between tasks and individual objectives explicit and reinforcing good group
activities – setting their own objectives, reaching consensus, regular well run focused
meetings, benchmarking to other teams, etc.
Openly compare team performance with others
One of the themes arising from the research is the performance benefit possible when a
team can compare itself to another team performing a similar task. Our recommendation
therefore is to organize work in a way which makes this comparison possible. It is vital,
however, that this is carried out in a non-divisive way with any incentive (financial or
otherwise) pegged to objective scales rather than to winner/loser competition. In other
words, reward is pegged to performance instead of being allocated to the “winning”
team. One has to be careful not to create an atmosphere that leads to high within-team
identity and collaboration for the price of between-team conflict that might be
detrimental to the whole company’s productivity. However, when team members
identify both with the organization as a whole and work collaboratively across team
boundaries, the organization will achieve its aims (Hoegl et al., 2004; Richter et al., 2006).
Encourage interdependence in the team
Conduct teamwork in a way that underlines the interconnection and mutual
interdependence of the team members. Apart from general ways to increase the team
awareness, this can be accomplished by stressing goal, task, and outcome
interdependence. For instance, goal interdependence can be increased by goal
setting strategies that connect the different interests of the team members and prevent
goal conflicts. Task interdependence can be realized by appropriate task design
determining the needs of coordination and communication between the team members.
However, as task interdependence can also become quite complex, it is important to
find a good compromise between connectivity and complexity that prevents trade-offs
due to opportunity costs. Finally, outcome interdependence is realized by including
team-based incentives in addition to individual incentives in order to underline the
common fate and mutual contributions to the team project.
Use symbols to create identity
The sense of identification with a team can be enhanced through the careful use of
symbols. Examples of this are to be found in the military where, for instance,
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inter-troop competition on the time taken to complete route marches was on the basis of
beating:
.its own best time;
.an objective standard; and
.the other troops.
This hierarchy of competition was made consistently clear and reinforced vigorously
and resulted in intense competition but with a focus on performance rather than on
beating the opposition (which could involve lower overall performance). Also in the
military, symbols were very evident from the very start of basic training with colors
allocated to each group and names relating to famous battles. It is common in this
environment for soldiers to have a tattoo of their unit’s symbol which shows the
meaningfulness of the group and its symbol.
In a more conventional setting, the Germany-based pharmaceutical company
Aventis Behring has the tradition that when going on a works outing, every team
starts with a group photograph with the team members standing in front of a big
bronze horse on the company’s premises. This horse was erected as a reminder to the
fact that it was a horse of which the founder of the company, Emil von Behring, got the
first serum for diphtheria from. The effect of this is to appeal to the notion of a higher
calling than the individual one and to emphasize the importance of the work under
way. As a consequence, the focus of identification shifts away from the individual
(there are things more important than just my career) to the team/organizational levels.
However, if symbols are simply imposed and have little meaning to the teams, this will
not be productive. For example, in the UK, a call center was interested in the fostering
of team working and sent all customer-facing staff on team programs. They were then
divided into teams and allocated names. However, the names had no obvious relevance
to the people concerned in contrast, they were even disturbing as the company chose
names of Irish rivers for the organization that was based in central England so that few
if any workers knew what the names meant.
Conclusion
To summarize, we propose that motivation losses in existing business teams can be
overcome, and that teams can bring their members to go the extra-mile and to put in
more effort into the teams’ tasks. We believe that on top of the strategies discussed by
many other authors, four identity-related aspects are particularly suited for managers
to start with positively influencing team cohesion and performance: select people who
have a sense that team loyalty is valuable and important, introduce clear, commonly
agreed goals and a long-time perspective to stress mutual interdependence and
future-oriented investments by the team members, compare your team with others to
stimulate constructive competition, and create identity by making the team visible to
the team members and by designing meaningful tasks team members can be proud of.
If these suggestions are followed, team work can pay-off the dividend and is a
fruitful route to tie in with other human resource practices (see for an overview,
Theriou and Chatzoglou, 2008) ultimately leading to the accomplishment of
organizational goals.
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About the authors
Rolf van Dick is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main,
Germany, and currently serves as Associate Dean of the Department of Psychology. His research
interests center on the application of social identity theory in organizational settings.
In particular, he is interested in identity processes in teams and organizations which are highly
diverse, he is applying identity research in the area of mergers and acquisitions and is currently
investigating leadership and identity. Currently, he is an Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of
Management and Journal of Personnel Psychology. He has published more than 60 papers in
leading outlets in psychology and management such as Academy of Management Journal,
Journal of Applied Psychology,Journal of Marketing and Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.
Patrick A. Tissington is a Senior Lecturer at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) and is a
Director of the Aston Centre for Research into Safety and Security (more info at www.
AstonCRISIS.com). His research interests centre on leadership and in particular how leaders and
teams function under extreme pressure. Current ongoing research includes a major European
Commission funded project on how governments prepare the public for large-scale disasters and
an investigation of the management of security provision at UK airports.
Guido Hertel is a Professor of Organizational Psychology at the University of Mu
¨nster,
Germany. His research interests are in the areas of synergy effects in groups, management of
distributed or “virtual” teams, and electronic human resource management. He serves as an
Associate Editor of Social Psychology and has published widely in outlets such as Human
Resource Management Review and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. More info at:
www.uni-muenster.de/opms/
Do many hands
make light work?
245
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... The results showed friendships in the workplace were negatively correlated with social loafing between certified public accountants. Second, van Dick et al. [66] assumed that individual work contribution loss is unavoidable when working in a team. In this context, they analyze how to overcome the social loafing problem. ...
... However, the study showed that the workplace friendships of employees in long-term care institutions did not significantly affect their social loafing. This result is different from the findings of the previous study by van Dick, Tissington and Hertel [66]. Although workplace friendship does not affect social loafing directly, the direct effects of workplace friendship on organizational commitment and psychological safety affect social loafing indirectly. ...
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In light of the aging population and the rapid growth of people with mental and physical disabilities, the demand for long-term care has increased significantly. In order to meet the massive need for long-term care, the government of the Republic of China has accelerated the training of manpower for care services, and the number of qualified staff and institutions in the long-term care industry has increased accordingly. Although the need for long-term care employees has increased, they face problems such as low pay, low levels of decent work feelings, and high work pressure. Moreover, the increase in employee numbers in the organization does not improve the overall efficiency of long-term care workers. Instead, it has a social loafing effect. Not only in Taiwan, but other countries worldwide, such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates, are experiencing a staff shortage, a lack of training, and social loafing in long-term care institutions due to the aging of their populations. Therefore, in this study, workplace friendship as the independent variable, organizational commitment and psychological safety as the mediating variables, and service climate as the moderating variable were used to investigate the effects of social loafing on the employees of long-term care institutions in Taiwan. The results showed that workplace friendship between employees positively and significantly affects organizational commitment and psychological safety. Moreover, organizational commitment and psychological safety will negatively and significantly affect their social loafing. Second, organizational commitment and psychological safety have mediating effects between workplace friendship and social loafing. Furthermore, the service climate of employees in long-term care institutions will positively moderate the impact of their workplace friendship on psychological safety. The results will be provided to those in charge of the long-term care service industry, training institutions, long-term care business-related organizations, and government agencies, as well as for reference in subsequent studies.
... For example, integrating game elements into group brainstorming has been shown to introduce competitive dynamics that enhance social comparison, motivating participants to engage more actively (Guegan et al., 2021). Similarly, the use of virtual avatars embedded with social identity cues has reinforced group membership (Guegan et al., 2017), thereby reducing social loafing and promoting more active participation in group work (van Dick et al., 2009). Additionally, chatbots functioning as brainstorming partners have been shown to reduce evaluation apprehension by providing a non-judgmental environment (Wieland et al., 2022). ...
... This result indicated that participants have better game performance in terms of reaction in the singleplayer mode compared with the multi-player modes. This result could be explained by the 'social loafing' effect, which is 'an individual's tendency to expend less task effort in a collective setting than in an individual setting' (van Dick et al., 2009).The highest game scores in the single-player group may be due to the fact that older adults in the single-player group were more nervous and had a greater motivation to learn, thus producing a higher game score. In the multi-player group, older adults developed emotional dependence on their partners, and they had relatively lower active learning motivation in the game due to the companionship and support of their partners, especially in the couple group, where older adults were more considerate of their partners' game experience and less motivated to compete, which affected the game score. ...
... This result indicated that participants have better game performance in terms of reaction in the singleplayer mode compared with the multi-player modes. This result could be explained by the 'social loafing' effect, which is 'an individual's tendency to expend less task effort in a collective setting than in an individual setting' (van Dick et al., 2009).The highest game scores in the single-player group may be due to the fact that older adults in the single-player group were more nervous and had a greater motivation to learn, thus producing a higher game score. In the multi-player group, older adults developed emotional dependence on their partners, and they had relatively lower active learning motivation in the game due to the companionship and support of their partners, especially in the couple group, where older adults were more considerate of their partners' game experience and less motivated to compete, which affected the game score. ...
... Through team learning, defined as "a change in the team's collective level of knowledge and skill produced by the shared experience of the team members" (Ellis et al., 2003, p. 822), individual members' knowledge is transformed and integrated into a collective knowledge pool (Van den Bossche et al., 2011). Thereby, by progressively acquiring more complex knowledge and skills, teams can overcome motivational barriers such as social loafing (Raes et al., 2015;van Dick et al., 2009). In this sense, team learning and team motivation are closely related (Bell et al., 2012). ...
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Alex Haslam has thoroughly revised and updated his ground-breaking original text with this new edition. While still retaining the highly readable and engaging style of the best-selling First Edition, the author presents extensive reviews and critiques of major topics in organizational psychology - including leadership, motivation, communication, decision making, negotiation, power, productivity and collective action - in this thoroughly revised edition. New to the Second Edition: An entirely new chapter on organizational stress which deals with highly topical issues of stress appraisal, social support, coping and burnout.; New, wider textbook format and design making the entire book much more accessible for students.; A wide range of pedagogical features are included - suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter and comprehensive glossaries of social identity, social psychological and organizational terms