Effects of personal involvement: Thought-provoking implications for social loafing.

In 1979, Latane, Williams, and Harkins observed that individuals working together put out less effort than when they work alone, an effect these researchers termed social loafing. Subsequent research (Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981) has suggested that this effect arises, at least in part, because when participants work with others on these tasks their individual outputs are lost in the crowd, and, thus, they can receive neither credit nor blame for their performances. However, it is unlikely that participants found the tasks used in these experiments (e.g., clapping, shouting) to be involving. The possibility that personal involvement could moderate the social loafing effect was tested in a 2 (high/ low involvement) X 2 (high/low identifiability) factorial design across three replications. Replicating previous loafing research, we found that under conditions of low involvement, participants whose outputs were identifiable worked harder than those whose outputs were pooled. However, when the task was personally involving, the loafing effect was eliminated. Participants whose outputs were pooled worked as hard as those participants whose individual outputs could be identified.