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Motivation and performance in teams: Transforming loafing into resonance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

Tony Glynn  and
Stuart G. Carr
Tony Glynn
Affiliation:
Department of Human Movement Studies, University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD 4072, Australia
Stuart G. Carr*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, Social Sciences, & Management, Northern Territory University, Darwin NT 0909, Australia
*
Corresponding author
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Abstract

Employee responses to being placed in workplace “teams” range from free-riding (shirking, social loafing) to working harder than ever before, and feelings of identity (or in-group) with the team may play a key role in facilitating the working harder response. Fifty-two Australian future managers worked on a workplace simulation task, either (a) alone (Control), (b) among a simulated unidentified aggregate of other students (team setting, no social identity), (c) with simulated other students from the same faculty competing against the Faculty of Law (in-group, social identity condition), or (d) amid a simulated out-group of students from Law, competing against the participant's own faculty (out-group condition, pre-existing conflicting loyalty condition). As predicted, compared to (a) working alone, aggregation (b) resulted in free-riding, which was reversed by merely invoking (c) a social (faculty) identity, but then reappeared under (d) an out-group condition. Tentative though the current data may be, “flip-over” effects like these may depend on a worker's pluralistic mix of individualistic and collectivistic repertoires. To the extent that such pluralism is found throughout Australia and elsewhere in the South Pacific (Taylor & S. Yavalanavanua, 1997), our findings may apply to ‘thinking through’ workplace team development elsewhere in the region.

Type
Short papers
Information
South Pacific Journal of Psychology , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , 1999 , pp. 71 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © University of Papua New Guinea and the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Territory University, Australia 1999

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