L RELATIONS ROCESSES Equity in Effort: An Explanation of the Social Loafing Effect

Previous researchers have demonstrated an effect termed social loafing: People expend less effort when working in groups than when working alone. The explanation of this decrement has been that people can "hide in the crowd" and get away with poor performance because their individual outputs are not identifiable; holding identifiability constant eliminates the loafing effect (Williams, Harkins & Latane, 1981). A second possible explanation, tested in this study, is that people, when working in groups, expect their co-performers to loaf and, therefore, reduce their own efforts to establish an equitable division of labor. A result that was consistent with this second explanation was that participants whose original expectations were violated by new information regarding their co-performer's intended level of effort matched their own efforts to these new expectations. In fact, participants matched their co-performer's level of effort whether their individual outputs were identifiable or not. These results suggest that this equity approach provides a second, viable explanation for the loafing effect. As with identifiability, holding constant the expectations about partner performance eliminates the loafing effect. In addition, a distinction is made between the factors that explain the effect and factors that simply provide limiting conditions for the effect.