Individual Motivation within Groups

Social Loafing and Motivation Gains in Work, Academic, and Sports Teams

Steven Karau

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780128498675
• eBook ISBN: 9780128118962
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Individual Motivation within Groups: Social Loafing and Motivation Gains in Work, Academic, and Sports Teams explores the state of our scientific understanding of when and why individuals are most and least likely to work hard as members of groups and work teams. This book addresses key psychological phenomena such as social loafing, social dilemmas, social facilitation, and ostracism, with each chapter creating connections to related topics such as leadership, performance in learning groups, isolated teams, and more. This volume provides a summary of the field's history, synthesizes related research, and, using the Collective Effort Model and other key motivational theories, looks at the current level of understanding of both motivation losses and gains in groups. Individual Motivation within Groups is a vital resource for social, organizational, and applied psychologists as well as academics and researchers in these fields and related areas such as leadership and team performance. - Explores individual motivation in multiple contexts such as work teams, educational settings, sports teams, and more - Highlights recent research advances, future directions, and linkages with related research areas - Discusses cross-cultural and international implications - Examines factors that detract from and contribute to group motivation/individual motivation within groups

Part 1

Foundations

• Chapter 1: Social Loafing and Motivation Gains in Groups: An Integrative Review

Chapter 1

Social Loafing and Motivation Gains in Groups: An Integrative Review

Steven J. Karau

Aric J. Wilhau Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

Abstract

Working with others on group or collective tasks often leads individuals to slack off and reduce their own efforts, but such motivation losses are not inevitable, and motivation gains can even occur under certain circumstances. In this chapter, we provide a detailed, integrative review of research and theory on individual motivation within groups and work teams. Specifically, we review historical foundations, classic studies, major theories, and key research findings and discuss the various group and team contexts and wide range of moderating variables that have been examined or identified by researchers. Coverage includes both motivation losses (i.e., social loafing) and motivation gains (including social compensation and the Köhler effect). We use the Collective Effort Model and meta-analytic results to integrate our review and highlight some promising directions for future research and practice. This chapter may serve both as a stand-alone review of the literature, and as an introduction to some of the more specific motivation loss and gain issues handled in greater depth in later chapters of this book.

Keywords

social loafing

motivation gains

Collective Effort Model

social compensation

Köhler effect

Chapter Outline

1. 1.1 Historical Overview and Classic Studies
2. 1.2 Robustness and Magnitude of Social Loafing
3. 1.3 Classic Theories of Social Loafing
   • 1.3.1 Social Impact Theory
   • 1.3.2 Arousal Reduction
   • 1.3.3 Evaluation Potential
   • 1.3.4 Dispensability of Effort
   • 1.3.5 Contributions and Limitations of Classic Theories
4. 1.4 The Collective Effort Model
5. 1.5 Factors That can Reduce or Eliminate Social Loafing
   • 1.5.1 Theoretical Analysis and Meta-Analytic Results
   • 1.5.2 Key Results From Experimental Research
   • 1.5.3 Insights From Perceived Loafing Field Studies
6. 1.6 Motivation Gains in Groups
   • 1.6.1 Theoretical Analysis
   • 1.6.2 Social Compensation
   • 1.6.3 The Köhler Effect
   • 1.6.4 Additional Potential Motivation Gains
7. 1.7 Future Directions and Conclusion
8. References

How does working on a collective task affect individual group members’ motivation to work hard and exert effort? When are groups most likely to reduce the motivation of individual members? Conversely, when do groups and work teams actually bring out the “motivational best” in individuals and stimulate especially high levels of effort? These questions are fundamental to our understanding of social aspects of motivation, group dynamics, and team performance. Given that groups are pervasive in human life and work teams are widely used by organizations, it is important to understand what contributes to and detracts from individual motivation and effort on collective, group, and team tasks. Fortunately, researchers across a variety of social science disciplines, with especially prominent participation of social psychologists and organizational behavior researchers, have been addressing these fundamental motivational and group dynamics questions for more than 130 years, conducting hundreds of laboratory experimental and field research studies of individual motivation within a variety of group contexts.

In the current chapter, we seek to provide readers with a detailed and integrative, yet reasonably accessible and efficient, review of the state of our scientific understanding of individual motivation in groups. We review research on both motivation losses and motivation gains, including overviews of historical trends, classic studies, major theories, key research findings, moderating variables and limiting conditions, insights from comparing different group and team contexts, and promising future directions. The research literatur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part 1: Foundations
• Part 2: Advances and Applications
• Part 3: Linkages
• Index