Evaluation and Performance

Abstract

Social loafing research has shown that participants working together put out less effort than participants working individually (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979), apparently a result of the fact that evaluation is not possible when outputs are pooled (Harkins & Jackson, 1985). On the other hand, research on creativity (e.g., Amabile, 1979), suggests that minimizing the expectation of evaluation facilitates performance. In the present study, treatment conditions typically used in social loafing and creativity research were incorporated in a single design. Participants were asked either to generate as many uses as possible for a common object or to generate uses that were as creative as possible. Participants were also led to believe either that their outputs could be evaluated or that their outputs would be pooled with those of others. The performance of participants given number instructions was facilitated by the prospect of evaluation. However, when asked to be creative, participants whose outputs were pooled performed better than participants whose outputs could be evaluated. These data suggest that on tasks that require creativity, conditions that are thought to lead to "loafing" can have the opposite effect.

Transformational Leadership, Diversity, and Creativity at Work: A Moderated Mediation Model

“…The research demonstrates that when feedback is perceived to be controlling, employee creativity decreases (Amabile, 1979;Amabile, Goldfarb, Brackfield, 1990;Bartis, Szymanski, & Harkins, 1988;Cheek & Stahl, 1986;Shalley & Perry-Smith, 2001;Szymanski & Harkins, 1992;Zhou, 1998). Conversely, when feedback or supervisory evaluations are perceived to be informative and for developmental purposes, creativity appears to be facilitated (Shalley, 1995;Zhou, 1998;Zhou & Oldham, 2001).…”

Positive Effekte sozialen Faulenzens beim Lösen komplexer Probleme

“…Einzelne Studien haben nachgewiesen, dass im Falle subjektiv bedeutsamer Aufgaben ein paradoxes Verhältnis von Motivation und Leistung vorliegt. Demnach werden in Gruppen -selbst wenn Personen weniger motiviert sind -bessere Leistungen erzielt als unter individuellen Arbeitsbedingungen (Bartis et al 1988;Griffith et al 1989;Jackson und Williams 1985). Gruppen, in denen Motivationsverluste auftreten, können somit sogar zu besseren Leistungen gelangen als hoch motivierte Personen.…”

“…Bereits Bartis et al (1988) sowie Jackson und Williams (1985) Der Nachweis des positiven Einflusses einer geringeren Motivation auf die Leistung für das Lösen von komplexen Problemen hat auch Konsequenzen für die Aussagen seitens der Vertreter der sozialpsychologischen Forschung, die soziales Faulenzen im Allgemeinen negativ bewerten: "It is a ,disease' in that it has negative consequences for individuals, social institutions, and societies. Social loafing results in a reduction in human efficiency, which leads to lowered profits and lowered benefits for all.…”

Dynamic tabletop interfaces for increasing creativity

“…Brainstorming in Osborn's framework is a collective idea generation technique which enables the group to benefit from many collective phenomena, but also suffers from several failings. Examples of positive effects associated to brainstorming include cognitive stimulation (the exposure to other participants' ideas enhances idea generation in individuals, see Dugosh et al, 2000;Nijstad et al, 2002;Dugosh & Paulus, 2005) and social comparison (the possibility to compare one's own performance to the others' is a source of motivation, see Harkins & Jackson, 1985;Bartis et al, 1988;Paulus & Dzindolet, 1993;Dugosh & Paulus, 2005;Michinov & Primois, 2005). …”

“…The benefits of social comparison are well-known. They can be observed for example when individual outputs are identifiable (with comparison to a situation where outputs are pooled, see Harkins & Jackson, 1985), when participants believe that their output will be evaluated (Bartis et al, 1988), when they are given a performance standard for their task (Paulus & Dzindolet, 1993;Shepherd et al, 1995), when they are exposed to the ideas of other participants (with comparison to a situation where they think the ideas come from a computer, see Dugosh & Paulus, 2005), or when they are periodically informed of each one's performance level (Michinov & Primois, 2005;Paulus et al, 2006). In all these experiments, social comparison was created by means of direct and explicit information (a group performance standard, individual performance levels) in the absence of implicit contextual information (group awareness, situation awareness, or performance perception).…”