Felt dispensability in groups of coactors: The effects of shared responsibility and explicit anonymity on cognitive effort

Weldon, Elizabeth; Mustari, Elisa

doi:10.1016/0749-5978(88)90033-7

Cited by 72 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Group researchers have long focused on identifying interventions to reduce or eliminate social loafing. The identification and attribution of individual member contributions is one such intervention that has been widely suggested as having the potential to reduce social loafing (Michener and DeLamater 1999, Parks and Sanna 1999, Weldon and Mustari 1988. In particular, the pooling of group contributions without accurately attributing individual contributions (i.e., using the equality principle for distributing rewards) is likely to lead to social loafing and reduced performance.…”

Section: Providing Feedbackmentioning

confidence: 98%

Enhancing the Motivational Affordance of Information Systems: The Effects of Real-Time Performance Feedback and Goal Setting in Group Collaboration Environments

2010

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Increasing globalization has created tremendous opportunities and challenges for organizations and societies. Consequently, a broad range of information technologies to better support the collaboration of diverse, and increasingly distributed, sets of participants is ever more utilized. Arguably, the success of such technology-mediated collaboration is dependent upon the quality of each individual's contributions; however, although individuals' motivations to do their best could be significantly influenced by the design of a system's human-computer interface, this area has received little attention within the context of group collaboration environments. We fill this gap by integrating research from human-computer interaction, motivation, and technology-supported group work to theoretically derive mechanisms for increasing each individual's motivation within a collective setting. Specifically, we manipulate the interface of a computer-mediated idea generation system (a widely used collaboration tool) to enhance the system's motivational affordance, i.e., the system's properties that fulfill users' motivational needs. Results from two studies demonstrate that by embedding the theoretically derived mechanisms "providing feedback" and "designing for optimal challenge" into the collaboration environment, significant performance gains were realized. The results suggest that even slight manipulations of the human-computer interface can contribute significantly to the successful design of a wide variety of group collaboration environments.human-computer interaction, motivational affordance, collaboration, computer-mediated idea generation, goal setting, performance feedback

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Section: Providing Feedbackmentioning

confidence: 98%

Enhancing the Motivational Affordance of Information Systems: The Effects of Real-Time Performance Feedback and Goal Setting in Group Collaboration Environments

2010

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“…Students who shared a judgement-making task with other members felt more dispensable than students working alone or in pairs causing them to increase their levels of social loafing (Weldon & Mustari 1988) Arousal Reduction (Harkins & Szymanski 1989) …”

Section: Social Loafing Is Reduced When Individuals Believe Their Inpmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social loafing in student entrepreneurship teams

Lyons¹,

Lynn²,

Bhaird³

2017

The Emergence of Entrepreneurial Behaviour

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“…productivity [59, see also 4]. Over the years, researchers have focused on identifying factors that reduce or eliminate social loafing, and have consistently suggested that having individual performances identifiable (i.e., identifiability [32]) and evaluable (i.e., evaluability [27]) appears to eliminate social loafing [48,53,78]. This expands the above question as follows: Is there a way to make individual performances identifiable and evaluable without sacrificing anonymity?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Weldon and Mustari [78] point out that the absence of performance information creates two major motivational problems: (1) social control of behavior by rewarding an appropriate performance behavior (using monetary or nonmonetary rewards such as social recognition or attention) is lost; and (2) the equality principle is used in distributing rewards after pooling contributions. Since performance information can provide not only appraisal information, which refers to information about how the group members' performances are being identified and evaluated, but also referent information, which refers to information that guides which behaviors are most appropriate for achieving the desired goal [7], it can serve as a cue to regulate appropriate behavior and as a (social) reward to motivate performance [6,58].…”

Section: Effects Of Evaluabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the context of electronic brainstorming (EBS), the effect of social loafing on productivity can be compounded with the anonymity that is an inherent part of group interaction because of the difficulty to determine who is contributing and who is not (i.e., process anonymity) and to associate comments to contributors (i.e., content anonymity) [13,17,53,74]. Despite the suggestion in social psychology that anonymity in group interaction can be quite dysfunctional [e.g., 21,41,66,78,83], empirical evidence about the effects of anonymity in the context of EBS thus far shows ideational effectiveness [e.g., 13,14,34]; at minimum, the effect of anonymity on the outcome is neutral [35,36].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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The Influence of Real-Time Identifiability and Evaluability Performance Feedback on Group Electronic Brainstorming Performance

Jung

Schneider

Valacich

Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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This study addresses the question of how to mitigate productivity losses in Electronic Brainstorming (EBS) due to social loafing. This article posits that loafing in the context of EBS may occur due to the combined effect of random group composition and anonymity in conjunction with unregulated individual performance behavior, not anonymity per se, and presents real-time, objective performance feedback as a plausible solution to combat social loafing. An automated real-time performance feedback system was incorporated into an existing EBS system and its effect on performance was empirically examined. Consistent with the suggestions of prior loafing research, in a controlled laboratory experiment groups given the identifiability treatment outperformed other treatments. Similarly, groups given the evaluability treatment outperformed other treatments. Furthermore, groups in the Identifiability and Evaluability treatment showed competitiveness among participants, promoting upward social comparison, and in turn outperforming all other groups in terms of idea quality.

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Felt dispensability in groups of coactors: The effects of shared responsibility and explicit anonymity on cognitive effort

Cited by 72 publications

References 18 publications

Enhancing the Motivational Affordance of Information Systems: The Effects of Real-Time Performance Feedback and Goal Setting in Group Collaboration Environments

Enhancing the Motivational Affordance of Information Systems: The Effects of Real-Time Performance Feedback and Goal Setting in Group Collaboration Environments

Social loafing in student entrepreneurship teams

The Influence of Real-Time Identifiability and Evaluability Performance Feedback on Group Electronic Brainstorming Performance

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