Matthew H. Hagen

Over 100 years of research have shown that social loafing is a real and material psychological phenomenon that reduces performance among humans in groups. It is known that increasing evaluation potential, decreasing deindividuation, and cohesion all lead to reduced social loafing in physical environments. What has not yet been well researched is whether or not the findings associated with many of these variables also apply to virtualized working environments.

In the present study, 200… Show more

Over 100 years of research have shown that social loafing is a real and material psychological phenomenon that reduces performance among humans in groups. It is known that increasing evaluation potential, decreasing deindividuation, and cohesion all lead to reduced social loafing in physical environments. What has not yet been well researched is whether or not the findings associated with many of these variables also apply to virtualized working environments.

In the present study, 200 individuals were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (an online work community) and were split into experimental and control groups. While both sets of participants engaged in identical alphabetization tasks and were informed that they were the final member of a five-person team, only the experimental subjects were asked to read the short biographies of their teammates and write a short biography of themselves for their teammates to read. By having experimental participants engage in self-disclosure it was expected they would experience reduced deindividuation (which is common with virtual teams), increased perceived evaluation potential, and increased feelings of cohesion.

Differences in quantity and quality of performance, and differences in morale (although not cohesion itself), were all in the expected direction, though none achieved levels of statistical significance driven largely by material performance variances within the datasets. Experimental subjects produced, on average, 1.9% additional correct alphabetization groupings (averaging 16.64 of 50 among experimental participants and 16.33 of 50 among control participants) compared to control subjects who were only aware they were a member of a team (F(1, 164) = .04, p >.05). Furthermore, in addition to attempting to alphabetize more groups, the experimental subjects’ answers were, on average, 0.38% more likely to be alphabetized correctly (F (1, 164) = .03, p > .05). Show less