Blackwell Reference Online

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The term social loafing refers to the tendency of individuals to expend less effort when working in collectives than when working by themselves. This is also called the Ringelmann effect, after a nineteenth‐century French agricultural engineer who noticed that the average force exerted by each individual group member declined as more people were added to a group pulling on a rope. The phenomenon was originally thought to be the result of coordination losses that result from individuals working together. The persistence of the effect even after controlling for these coordination losses led Latane, Williams, and Harkins (1979) to coin the term “social loafing” and propose that declining productivity resulted from reduced efforts by individuals. Research in this area has tended to focus on contextual factors that affect social loafing. Results suggest that individuals loaf more when their contributions cannot be identified, when they perceive the group task to be easy, and when they belong to less cohesive groups. Increasing individual accountability and group cohesion and designing the right incentive structures are among the proposed remedies to the problem of loafing. In contrast to past research focusing on situational factors, recent research suggests that the tendency to loaf might be an individual difference and could be correlated with aspects of personality ( Smith et ... log in or subscribe to read full text