Taking a Free Ride: How Team Learning Affects Social Loafing

Although collaboration is increasingly required in today's academic and work contexts, there are many ways in which teamwork can be impaired by dysfunctional inefficiencies and process loss. An important form of process loss is the tendency for individual members of a team to exert less effort than their fellow team members (i.e., social loafing). Since teams need to sustain the effort of team members as a collaborative resource, it is imperative to understand factors that shape social loafing in team tasks. This study examines simultaneously the degree to which goal orientation and changes in team learning (i.e., shifts in collective knowledge) affect social loafing. The authors use a multiwave design to explain changes in social loafing tendencies of 675 students working in teams. They conduct linear mixed effects modeling to show that individual team members who belong to teams that score higher than other teams on team learning throughout 9 weeks of teamwork experience a decrease in social loafing. Although learning and performance orientations are significantly related to initial self- or peer-rated social loafing, they cannot explain ensuing changes in social loafing. Results highlight the importance of considering team-level dynamic properties when explaining fluctuations of motivation in teams. Educational Impact and Implications Statement Even though small group work has gradually progressed to being one of the dominant approaches in the domain of learning and instruction and professional development, research shows that large numbers of team members exhibit unco-operative behaviors such as social loafing (i.e., individuals' tendency to expend less effort than their fellow team members). The results of a nine-week longitudinal study with 675 students working in teams reveal that teams experiencing a steeper shift in team's collective knowledge (i.e., team learning) than other teams show a decrease in social loafing tendencies over time. Additionally, they show that the learning and performance orientations of individual members predict social loafing at the start of the collaboration. These findings help us better understand how dynamic team-level properties can prevent individual members from engaging in dysfunctional behaviors.