《社会心理学》课程教学资源（文献资料）group processes——Social Loafing and Social Compensation - The Effects of Expectations of Co-Worker Performance.pdf

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1991, Vol. 61, No. 4,570-581 Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/91/S3.00 Social Loafing and Social Compensation: The Effects of Expectations of Co-Worker Performance Kipling D. Williams University of Toledo Steven J. Karau Purdue University Previous research has suggested that people tend to engage in social loafing when working collectively. The present research tested the social compensation hypothesis, which states that people will work harder collectively than individually when they expect their co-workers to perform poorly on a meaningful task. In 3 experiments, participants worked either collectively or coactively on an idea generation task. Expectations of co-worker performance were either inferred from participants' interpersonal trust scores (Experiment 1) or were directly manipulated by a confederate coworker's statement of either his intended effort (Experiment 2) or his ability at the task (Experiment 3). All 3 studies supported the social compensation hypothesis. Additionally, Experiment 3 supported the hypothesis that participants would not socially compensate for a poorly performing co-worker when working on a task that was low in meaningfulness. People often work together in groups to accomplish various goals. Many group tasks are collective tasks, in which members' contributions are pooled with those of their co-workers. Committees, sports teams, juries, marching bands, quality control teams, and government task forces are but a few examples of groups that combine their efforts to form a single product. Possibly the first social psychological study, conducted in the 1880s by Ringelmann (cited in Kravitz & Martin, 1986), examined the effects of working collectively on a rope pulling task. At present, more than 55 studies have examined the effort expended by individuals when working on individual versus collective tasks (see Jackson & Williams, 1989). The results of these studies indicate that people expend less effort collectively than coactively (working individually but in the presence of other co-workers), a phenomenon referred to as social loafing. A number of variables have been demonstrated to moderate social loafing. For example, social loafing can be reduced or eliminated by increasing the identifiability or evaluability of the individual members' contributions' (Szymanski & Harkins, 1987; Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981), enhancPortions of this article were presented at the 1988 Nags Head Conference on Groups and Organizations; the 1988 96th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association convention in Atlanta, Georgia; the 1989 Midwestern Psychological Association convention in Chicago; and the 1990 Society for Experimental Social Psychology convention in Buffalo, New \brk. We thank Robert Flaherty, Lynn Gardner, Katherine Glad, Katherine Kerr, Doug Langon, Jon Stroud, and Brad Thurmond for their assistance in running the experiments. We also thank Robert Arkin, Cathy Booth, Martin Bourgeois, Stephen Harkins, Irwin Horowitz, Jeffrey Jackson, Amy Kaylor, Janice Kelly, Norbert Kerr, Constantine Sedikides, and James Shepperd for their comments on this article or on presentations of this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kipling D. Williams, Department of Psychology, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio 43606, or requested through Internet: FAX0434 @UOFT02.TOLEDO.EDU. ing personal involvement with the task (Brickner, Harkins, & Ostrom, 1986), elevating the uniqueness of individual contributions (Harkins & Petty, 1982), or strengthening group cohesiveness (Williams, 1981). Consider an example of a teacher who divides a class into small groups and assigns them to work together on a project, hand in one paper, and share the grade. The social loafing literature would lead one to expect that each student's motivation and effort would decrease compared with a situation in which the teacher assigned individual papers and projects. In fact, the first author often uses this example as an illustration of social loafing in his lectures, and students remember how awful those types of assignments were because the "others in their groups always loafed." Ironically, and almost without exception, the students claimed that they were the ones left to "carry the load" for the others in their group. Of course, it is easy to view this response as an example of students desiring to present themselves in a favorable light. It is also likely, however, that certain people do exert more effort on collective tasks or that, under certain circumstances, most people will feel it necessary to shoulder the burden for others. Not too long ago in a class in which this type of assignment was given, a student who had done exceptionally well in the prerequisite course approached the instructor after class and, fighting back tears, stated that she knew she would end up doing all the work for the others in her 1 Some researchers (Harkins, 1987; Harkins & Szymanski, 1989; Kerr & Bruun, 1983) have defined social loafing as motivation loss in groups caused by reduced identifiability or evaluation. We agree that evaluation plays an important role in social loafing but choose not to define social loafing in these terms because (a) defining the phenomenon in terms of its causes prevents, by definition, the discovery of new causes for the same effect; and (b) evidence suggests there are other causes of social loafing, such as redundancy of contribution (Harkins & Petty, 1982) and dispensability of effort (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). We prefer to adopt a less restrictive definition of social loafing consistent with the original formulation: the tendency to reduce one's effort when working collectively compared with individually on the same task. 570

SOCIAL LOAFING AND SOCIAL COMPENSATION 571 group. She felt that she could not rely on the others because they would take advantage of the collective task and loaf. She also believed that her co-workers were probably not as motivated or able as she. She felt she had no choice but to do everything that the group was supposed to do to merely share an A on the paper. Despite attempts to assure her that this did not have to happen, she ended up doing almost all of the work. Why? We are proposing that under some conditions, people may actually work harder in a collective setting than in a coactive setting in order to compensate for the others in their group, an effect we refer to as social compensation. One factor that might produce social compensation is the expectation that other group members are performing insufficiently. Under these circumstances, we propose that individuals will feel compelled to contribute more to the collective goal to compensate for the inadequate contributions of their co-workers. The perception of inadequate co-worker contributions may be derived from a general lack of trust in the reliability of others to perform well when their contributions are pooled with those of others or from direct knowledge of co-workers' insufficient efforts or abilities. The second factor we believe may be necessary to produce compensation is that the group product is in some way important to the individuals involved. If the task or the group product is seen as meaningless, then there is no need to compensate for poorly performing co-workers, because the evaluation of the group product simply does not matter to the individual. If, however, the evaluation of the group product is important to the individual, then he or she will be motivated to avoid a poor group performance by compensating for the poorly performing co-workers. These hypotheses are consistent both with expectancy-value models of effort and with self-validation theories. For example, expectancy-value models of effort (e.g., Heckhausen, 1977; Vroom, 1964) suggest that individuals will be willing to exert effort on a task only to the degree that they expect their effort to result in performance that is instrumental in obtaining valued outcomes. Applied to social loafing, we would expect an individual's motivation and effort to be greatest when working on a task in which the group performance is strongly contingent on his or her individual effort and when group performance is expected to lead to outcomes that are highly valued by the individual (e.g., a favorable evaluation). Thus, expectations of coworker performance are likely to strongly influence individual motivation on collective tasks. When individuals expect their co-workers to perform well, the contingency between their own effort and the group performance is reduced because the group is likely to perform well even if the individuals reduce their own inputs. However, when individuals expect their co-workers to perform poorly, the contingency between their own effort and the group performance is actually enhanced. Thus, when outcome valence and the instrumentality of performance to outcomes are held constant, people are likely to work harder when they expect their co-workers to perform poorly and less hard when they expect their co-workers to perform well. However, the mere expectation that one's co-workers will not perform well may not be sufficient to increase motivation. Individuals will be concerned with the quality of the group performance only when it is instrumental to obtaining valued outcomes. In accord with an expectancy-value framework, if individuals expect their co-workers to perform poorly, they will not be willing to compensate unless they expect their performance on the task to lead to highly valued outcomes. Thus, individuals are more likely to compensate when they find the task to be intrinsically meaningful or are concerned with the evaluation of the group's performance by the experimenter, themselves, or co-workers. We do not mean to imply that the task must be viewed as vital or highly meaningful in order for compensation to occur. It is likely, however, that individuals will be unwilling to compensate for poorly performing co-workers if they expect their performance on the task to be irrelevant to obtaining an outcome that has at least some personal value. Theoretical orientations focusing on the self also suggest that the desire for self-validation could lead people to compensate for co-workers on a collective task. Several theories suggest that people desire positive evaluation, especially in comparison with others. Most research has focused on social comparison at the individual level, but Goethals and Darley's (1987) revision of social comparison theory suggests that people not only compare themselves with others for self-validation, but they also compare the groups to which they belong with other groups for the same reasons. Similarly, social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) suggests that often people gain positive self-identity through the accomplishments of the groups to which they belong (see also Cialdini et al., 1976). Goethals and Darley (1987) stated that "individuals experiencing negative social identity are predicted to leave their groups or attempt to make them better" (p. 33). Presumably, a negative social identity could be anticipated if one is performing on a collective task with unproductive co-workers. One way to make the group better would be to work harder, that is, to compensate. Consistent with the notion that people are concerned for their group's evaluation even when their individual performances cannot be evaluated, Harkins and Szymanski (1989) found that on collective tasks people are less likely to loaf if they believe the performance of their group is being compared with the performance of other groups. In the present context, when working on a collective task with others who are expected to perform poorly, individuals will be motivated to bolster the performance of their group by increasing their own efforts. This would be true only to the extent that performance on the task is perceived as pertinent to self-validation, hence, only when the task (or the evaluation of the task performance) is perceived as meaningful. On the other hand, if the performance of the others is expected to be good, then individuals can opt to reduce their efforts and still receive a favorable group evaluation. Both of these theoretical perspectives also explain why social compensation has not emerged in previous research. According to the expectancy-value model, loafing occurs because there is a higher contingency between individual effort and valued outcomes coactively than collectively. As group size increases, factors other than individual effort (e.g., the effort of other group members and attributes of the task) increasingly determine group performance, and valued outcomes (e.g., a favorable evaluation) are diffused among all of the group members. Consistent with this point, the self-validation approach suggests that people can more effectively control their evaluations when working

572 KIPLING D. WILLIAMS AND STEVEN J. KARAU coactively than when they work collectively because collectively they only share a diffused evaluation. On collective tasks, individuals are provided with an opportunity to obtain a positive evaluation without working hard themselves when they expect their co-workers to perform adequately. Indeed, studies that have measured participants' perceptions of their co-workers' performance indicate that they do not expect their co-workers to loaf (e.g., Harkins, Latane, & Williams, 1980; Jackson & Harkins, 1985; Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979; Williams et al., 1981). Therefore, both perspectives suggest that participants will demonstrate social compensation only if there is a strong reason for them to believe the group will do poorly and only if they care about the evaluation. Only a few studies have directly examined the effects of expectations of co-worker performance on individuals' effort in collective tasks. Moreover, studies that have manipulated expectations of co-worker performance are in disagreement, both with each other and with our predictions. Kerr (1983) studied individual effort on a disjunctive air-pumping task in which at least one member in the group had to reach an explicit criterion level for the group to succeed.2 He suggested that loafing would occur with a co-worker who is expected to perform well because individuals would view it as an opportunity to "free ride." He also predicted that loafing would occur with a capable coworker who is not expected to perform well because individuals would not want to be taken for a "sucker." In both collective conditions with a capable co-worker, individual participants reached the criterion fewer times (on average, seven of nine trials) than in the alone control condition (eight of nine trials). Although there were no differences between the two collective conditions, Kerr reasoned that in the success condition, participants were free riding, allowing their co-worker to carry the load, whereas in the failure condition, participants felt exploited and refused to play the role of the sucker. Although Kerr (1983) focused on the two trials in which his collective participants failed to reach criterion, we prefer to focus on the fact that participants, and hence their groups, succeeded on seven of nine trials when their co-worker consistently failed. We feel that participants actually compensated by being responsible for their group's success on the majority of trials and communicated their desire not to be a sucker on a minority of the trials. Essentially, Kerr's participants were able to come out of the experiment feeling successful while sending a message to their co-worker that they were not willing to be a complete sucker on all of the trials. We suggest that had Kerr included a condition in which participants were especially concerned about their group's performance, a larger compensation effect would have been found (if a ceiling effect would not have prevented it). In another study that manipulated expectations of co-worker performance on a collective task (i.e., shouting out loud), Jackson and Harkins (1985) reported that participants "matched" the level of output that they expected from their co-workers, suggesting that people seek to maintain equity in effort when working together. Participants' expectations of how hard their co-worker would work were manipulated so that participants expected their co-worker either to try hard or not to try hard on a shouting task. Jackson and Harkins demonstrated that the social loafing effect was eliminated and that participants matched their expectations of their co-worker's efforts. However, in Jackson and Harkins's (1985) experiment, the confederate/co-worker's statement of her intended effort was confounded with her evaluation of the experiment's worth. In the high effort condition, the co-worker told participants that she thought the experiment was interesting, and that she was going to try hard. In the low effort condition, she told participants that she thought the experiment was boring, and that she was not going to try hard. Hackman and Morris (1975) suggested that interacting with group members who dislike the task will transmit that attitude to co-workers and cause them to minimize their efforts. Indeed, research on job attitudes (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978) suggests that workers' perceptions of and motivations toward their task are highly influenced by coworkers' assessments of the task. Therefore, the confederate's assessment of the worth of the task could have alone accounted for why Jackson and Harkins did not find compensation in the low effort condition and why they found a main effect for partner effort. In the high effort (and high meaningfulness) condition, our theoretical analysis would lead us to expect a social loafing effect. It may be that no loafing effect occurred because perceiving the task as especially meaningful resulted in a ceiling effect: Participants were unable to increase their effort in the coactive condition because they were already shouting as loudly as they could in the collective condition. Unlike some additive tasks, shouting is limited by physical constraints. Therefore, although these two experiments are relevant to our interests, they fail to provide a clear test of the social compensation hypothesis. To examine the effects of expectations of co-worker performance on individual effort in a collective task, we designed three studies that varied different aspects of these expectations. In each experiment, participants worked either coactively or collectively on an idea generation task that was designed to be viewed as meaningful. In Experiment 1, expectations of co-worker performance were inferred from participants' interpersonal trust levels. In Experiment 2, expectations of co-worker effort were manipulated. In Experiment 3, both expectations of co-worker ability and of the meaningfulness of the task were manipulated. In all three studies, we hypothesized that, when working on a task that they considered meaningful, participants would compensate for a co-worker whom they expected to perform poorly and would actually work harder collectively than coactively. Experiment 1 Participants pretested on interpersonal trust were asked to work on an idea generation task either coactively or collectively. 2 There are a number of differences between Kerr's (1983) paradigm and the more typical social loafing paradigm. His participants were completely identifiable to themselves, their co-worker, and the experimenter. Thus, evaluation was strong and present in both coactive and collective settings, leaving responsibility for and control over the outcome as potential causes for reduced effort. Additionally, Kerr used a disjunctive task that had a threshold criterion for success such that if either participant succeeded, the group succeeded

SOCIAL LOAFING AND SOCIAL COMPENSATION 573 We expected participants scoring high or medium on trust to loaf collectively, because they would tend to expect that others would carry their own weight on the group task. Participants scoring low in trust were hypothesized to compensate collectively because they would tend to expect others to loaf and would feel compelled to work harder so as to maintain a favorable evaluation of themselves. Method Participants and design. In a pretest session at the beginning of the quarter at the University of Washington, 1,085 introductory psychology students responded to Rotter's (1967) Interpersonal Trust Scale. Rotter reported test-retest coefficients of .68 and .56 on two samples, p < .01, and a significant split-half reliability coefficient of .76 on a sample of 547 college students, p < .001. From the resulting normal distribution of this scale, 126 students were called back to participate in the experiment but were not told their participation was related to their test scores. Forty-two of these participants scored in the bottom quintile (low trusters) of the pretest sample, 41 scored in the middle quintile (medium trusters), and 43 scored in the top quintile (high trusters). Experimental task. The additive task of idea generation was chosen for two reasons. First, effort would be directly related to performance. Second, the task could be presented in a meaningful way so that performance on the task would be important to the participants. The idea generation task requires participants to come up with as many uses as possible for a given object in the time provided. In our study, participants were asked to come up with as many uses as possible for a knife in a 12-min period. They were instructed to write each use on a separate slip of paper and insert the slip into the appropriate box (depending on the condition). Procedure. Upon entering the waiting area, participants in groups of 4 to 8 were greeted by the experimenter and were led to a room where they were seated in one of eight chairs, arranged in a circle. Between each set of chairs and directly in the middle of the chairs were black cloth partitions that prevented the participants from seeing each other. On each desk was a felt-tipped pen (so that it would be impossible for participants to monitor each other's performances). Participants were then handed instruction booklets that varied according to the coactive/collective work condition. The experimenter read the instructions aloud while the participants followed along. Participants in both conditions read the following instructions: We are interested in studying the performance of groups and individuals on what is called a "brainstorming" task. 'You will be given the name of an object and your task will be to come up with as many uses for this object as you can. Don't be concerned about the quality of the uses you come up with. The uses can be ordinary or unusual. It is, however, important that you write down as many uses as you can in the time allotted. We are interested in the number of uses that can be generated for a single object, so all of you will be generating uses for the same object. The next portion of the written instructions varied depending on the work condition. Participants in the coactive condition read the following: I will ask you to write one use on each slip of paper, and then put that slip of paper into the box at your side before you write down the next use. It is not important if you happen to come up with the same uses as your partners. I want to see how many uses each of you can come up with. Thus, each of you bears the full responsibility for generating as many uses as you can. Participants in the collective condition read the following: I will ask you to write one use on each slip of paper, and then insert that slip of paper into the common box in the middle. It is not important if you happen to come up with the same uses as your partners. I want to see how many uses your group can come up with. Thus, you share the responsibility with your partners for coming up with as many uses as you can. The experimenter told the participants to begin, started his stopwatch, and then left the room. When the task was completed, the experimenter reentered the room and handed out a brief questionnaire with items assessing various participant perceptions as well as manipulation checks. Participants then completed the questionnaire while the experimenter was out of the room. Participants were then debriefed and dismissed. Results Performance measures. Overall, there was a significant loafing effect, with participants generating more uses when working coactively (27.7 uses) than collectively (24.5 uses), F(l, 120) = 5.51, p < .03. More important, the results support the social compensation hypothesis, with a significant Trust X Work Condition interaction, F(2,120) = 10.59, p < .0001 (see Table 1). A priori contrasts revealed that medium trusters demonstrated a significant social loafing effect, producing 25.5 uses in the coactive condition and 21.1 in the collective condition, r(39) = 2.00, p < .03. The high trusters showed an even stronger loafing effect, producing 33.2 uses coactively and 22.6 uses collectively, t(41) = 4.29, p < .001. As predicted by the social compensation hypothesis, low trusters actually worked harder collectively (29.6 uses) than coactively (24.5 uses), r(40) = -1.95, p < .03. There was also a significant main effect for trust, F(2, 120) = 4.03, p < .03, in that medium trusters (23.3 uses) were less productive than either low (27.1) or high trusters (27.5).3 There were no significant effects for gender. Ancillary data. All questions used 100-point scales. As expected, the task was regarded as being relatively easy (M = 19.9). All participants regarded the task as somewhat fun (A/= 54.2), and felt they experienced about an average amount of anxiety (M = 46.9). These data suggest that the participants found the task to be at least moderately meaningful. A process check on the differences in perceived identifiability (0 = not at all and 100 = very) of coactive (M = 49.3) versus collective (M = 46.3) participants was not significant (p > .20). Debriefing and subsequent research, however, has led us to believe that participants had difficulty interpreting this particular question. Another question asked participants if they thought the others in their session generated fewer, the same, or more uses than they did (on a 100-point scale in which 50 represented the same). Supporting the notion that low trusters expected their co- 3 In both Experiments 1 and 3, there appeared to be some heteroscedasticity in the number of uses data. Reanalyses of these data sets using a log transformation revealed identical patterns of means and significant effects

574 KIPLING D. WILLIAMS AND STEVEN J. KARAU Table 1 Mean Number of Uses Generated for a Knife as a Function of Levels of Trust and Work Condition Work condition Trust level (quintile) Coactive Collective Low M n SD Medium M n SD High M n SD 24.45 20 7.73 25.48 21 9.19 33.20 20 10.04 29.55 22 9.05 21.05 20 3.71 22.61 23 5.86 workers to reduce their efforts when working collectively, the only condition in which participants thought that their coworkers generated fewer uses than they did (M= 42.91) was the low trust, collective condition (95% confidence interval = 36.7 to 49.1). When asked how much effort participants thought people generally exert on collective tasks compared with individual tasks, they indicated (as has often been the case in previous social loafing research) that there would not be any difference (M = 50.8, in which 50 represented the same) between working coactively and working collectively. Discussion The behavioral data from Experiment 1 provide strong support for the hypothesis that levels of trust determine whether social loafing or social compensation will occur. Whereas other research in social loafing has shown that various factors decrease or eliminate social loafing, this finding demonstrates a significant increase in effort by individuals on a collective task. Social loafing once again has been demonstrated for the medium trusting person (assuming this typifies the average participant in past research), and even more so for the high trusting person. Low trusters, however, were actually more productive when working collectively than when working coactively. Of course, as with any study using individual differences to demonstrate a causal link between factors, it could be that other variables associated with trust accounted for such a pattern. Furthermore, we did not assess directly our assumption that low trusters compensated because they thought their co-workers were loafing. Although the results from Experiment 1 are intriguing and suggestive, we felt that it was necessary to submit the social compensation hypothesis to more direct tests by manipulating experimentally expectations of co-worker performance. Experiment 2 The purpose of Experiment 2 was to directly manipulate the participants' expectations of their co-worker's efforts. Rather than link the co-worker's intended effort with his or her appraisal of the task, as did Jackson and Harkins (1985), we kept the appraisal constant and positive throughout. To ensure that the task was perceived as meaningful, we told participants that performance on the task was thought to be related to intelligence. Two levels of co-worker effort (high or low) were crossed with two work conditions (coactive or collective). We predicted that social loafing would occur for participants working with a high effort co-worker, whereas social compensation would occur for those working with a low effort co-worker. Method Design and participants. The experiment used a 2 (low vs. high co-worker effort) X 2 (coactive vs. collective work condition) betweensubjects factorial design. Participants were 49 introductory psychology students at Purdue University who fulfilled partial course credit by their participation. Ten participants were eliminated from the final analyses because they indicated possible suspicions regarding loafing (they had read about it in the textbook), the authenticity of the confederate, or the experimental hypotheses.4 This resulted in a total of 39 participants. Procedure. The idea generation task used in Experiment 1 was used in Experiment 2, with slight modifications. Two participants (one of whom was a male confederate) were greeted by the male experimenter and shown into the laboratory. They were seated next to each other and were separated by a large filing cabinet that prevented the two participants from seeing one another. On each desk was a pair of headphones, a pen, and a box of blank slips of paper. In the coactive condition, participants had separate boxes placed next to them on the floor. In the collective condition, a common box (with an opening in the top accessible to both participants but preventing each from seeing inside) was placed between the two tables. The experimenter then read similar instructions as were read in Experiment 1. In addition, participants were told: \bu both will be working on a "brainstorming-type" task. The purpose of this experiment is to examine rapid thinking, a quality that is thought to be highly correlated with intelligence in adults. Your task is to come up with as many uses for an object as you can. \bu will be working side by side, without communicating. The experimenter then told the participants that a recent theory suggested that rapid thinking was highly correlated with intelligence, and that it was therefore extremely important that they come up with as many uses as they possibly could. The experimenter also told participants that he would count up their individual scores (or group scores, if in the collective condition) at the end of the session and tell them how many uses they had produced. In addition, their scores would be compared with those of other participants who had been in similar research studies at other universities. Participants in the collective condition were also told that once their uses had been counted, the uses 4 The distribution of suspicious participants was approximately even across three of the four conditions, with no suspicious participants in the high effort, coactive condition. The suspicious participants in the high effort, collective condition tended to believe the coworker's announcement to be sarcastic, thereby interpreting the message to be the opposite, as was intended. In the low effort conditions, suspicious participants found it difficult to believe that their co-worker would not work hard on a task they found interesting. We felt it was necessary to have the co-worker state that the task was interesting so participants would not interpret the co-worker's statement of intended effort as an evaluation of the task's meaningfulness