Agile Fixes Social Loafing

Yes, I know. It is click bait. But you knew that before you clicked, if your a Manager who believes they can have zero social loafing or an Agile Coach wanting to look to science to show how Agile is the one and true God.... I shall admit upfront. This article will show you how Agile mitigates social loafing (although not the only way). However, Agile will not completely remove social loafing. There I said it...

What this article will try and do is identify what social loafing is, possible causes, the recommended solution and then show what we Agile people already do.

What is Social Loafing

Groups can be fantastically unproductive because they provide such wonderful camouflage. Under cover of group work people will slack off, happy in the knowledge others are probably doing the same. And even if they’re not: who’ll know? This is what psychologists have nattily called social loafing and it was beautifully demonstrated by a French professor Max Ringelmann as early as the 1890s. Ringelmann, often credited as one of the founders of social psychology, had people pull on ropes either separately or in groups of various sizes and he measured how hard they pulled. He found that the more people were in the group, the less work they did.

Since Ringelmann’s original study many others have got the same result using different types of tasks. Most entertainingly Professor Bibb Latané and colleagues had people cheering, shouting and clapping in groups as loud as they could (Latané et al., 1979). When people were in groups of six they only shouted at one-third of their full capacity. The lazy so-and-so's.

The effect has been found in different cultures including Indians, Taiwanese, French, Polish and Americans, it’s been found in tasks as diverse as pumping air, swimming, evaluating poems, navigating mazes and in restaurant tipping. However social loafing is less prevalent in collectivist cultures such as those in many Asian countries, indeed sometimes it is reversed.

It’s not hard to see why this finding might worry people in charge of organisations. But note that social loafing is most detrimental to the productivity of a group when it is carrying out ‘additive tasks’: ones where the effort of each group member is summed. Not all tasks fit in to this category. For example a group problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group – social loafing wouldn’t necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.

Causes of Social loafing

As social creatures of habits there are a few theories as to why we loaf. Firstly, it is said that it is natural for humans to loaf and it increases the less visible your specific tasks are in a group. When groups are larger, the individuals become more anonymous. Imagine you’re doing something on your own: if it goes well you get all the glory, if it goes wrong you get all the blame. In a group, both blame and glory are spread, so there’s less carrot and less stick.

Groups are formed normally from management with no set clear social contract or purpose to seek higher goals, as per herzberg's research this will also create dissatisfaction and therefore less motivation. Can we find that this lack of motivation is a primer for loafing? maybe. We find that no standards in a group mean the group hasn't agreed to perform such actions and thus everyone assumes others will complete the tasks on their behalf.

This leads nicely onto the bias that if everyone is expecting me to loaf and I expect them to, whether consciously or unconsciously people say to themselves; everyone else is going to slack off a bit so I’ll slack off a bit as well because it’s not fair if I do more work than the other

What if you are not a loafer and you work hard? Well eventually the studies say you will become resentful and 'revenge loaf' (Chen et all, 2014). Which is probably why great workers who are demotivated, become loafing workers three months in.

Lastly, we see that personal motivation and accomplishment is linked to individual loafing. IF the task doesn't relate to the individuals personal goals, they are not motivated to perform the action in the team (Woodman et all, 2011), this is especially true if there is no feedback from the team and if there is ambiguity in the task at hand (Lee, 2015).

Now image if the team members are given tasks that have no traceability back to higher customer goals, so there is no way for the team members to feel a sense of accomplishment and they are in an environment where the teams have been forced together for the benefit of management in teams of 20-30 (Jones & H?igaard, 2014). Sounds like a few projects I remember. Now I know where that 10% buffer went!

Recommended Solutions

As you can see from the above, empowerment, autonomy, motivation and team culture are key areas of concern for any manager looking for results. Not only do these allow for higher productivity but we can now see how they will help mitigate social loafing which can be detrimental to any project or product upgrade.

Motivation

Studies around motivational theory from the likes of Hogan and Vroom show us that intrinsically linked motivation is linked to lower social loafing, with a key push towards task variability (Lee, 2014).

Task importance. Studies have shown that when people think the task is important they do less loafing. Zacarro (1984) found that groups constructing ‘moon tents’ (don’t ask me!) worked harder if they thought the relevance of the task was high, thought they were in competition with another group and were encouraged to think the task was attractive.

So if the tasks are variable, important and in line with the team members idea of purpose. The motivation for the work will outweigh any reason for social loafing.

Team Culture

Group importance. When the group is important to its members they work harder. Worchel et al. (1998) had people building paper chains in two groups, one which had name tags, matching coats and a sense of competition. Compared to a group given none of these, they produced 5 more paper chains.

Decreasing the ‘sucker effect’. The sucker effect is that feeling of being duped when you think that other people in the group are slacking off. Reducing or eliminating this perception is another key to a productive group.

Teams that start to dehumanise, can separate themselves from the group and thus not empathise with the group. To fix this, the groups must work as a team, building outside of work relationships to see themselves as equal in a purpose (omar et all, 2011)

Social identity theory tells us that similarities build trust and those relationships mean less loafing (perry et all, 2016)

Team Culture is huge in all aspects of business, with social loafing as a major risk, team need to spend more time together in activities that are not work (I recommend the pub), they need to identify with the group, share a common purpose and spend longer than 8 weeks as a team... to allow those relationships to grow (couldn't find my cite for this... trust me?).

Empowerment

Leaders who are respected are more likely to have higher performance per staff member (Ferrante et all, 2006).

People can be made to work harder by cutting off their natural tendency to hide in the group. by empowering them with the functions of leadership. Having teams self organise, control their process, create a social contract and enable them to deliver outputs in a way that suits them as a unit, means this unit will focus on delivery rather then Facebook (stark, 2007)

Create a friendly environment (jones et all, 2014). I will give an example here. I worked at a major NZ bank where the coffee was great, I was taken to fancy restaurants and there was beer on Fridays. I absolutely loved that contract and everyone I remember pulled in hard. I moved to another major NZ bank, where the tea was terrible. I remember both working environments for unproductive reasons...

Agile

The agility mindset and the agile ‘framework’ are two different things with a whole range of fun differences. I will focus on the more mainstream approach that the Agile Mindset enables self-actualization (to use Marslows term)

If human nature is to loaf when things are a little in the dark. Agile solves this by putting everything visible voluntarily, the more visible the better, tasks should be seen by any person in the organisation (preferably randomly), the tasks should be able to be understood by a lamen and they should be traceable not only to the ‘EPIC’ but to the benefit the customer is receiving! This highly motivated part of Agile is designed to make us accountable for our tasks, which not only shows as per motivational theory to be productive but also allows mitigation of natural aspect of social loafing. To push this fact home, the motivational theory also tells us that feedback from the customer is also more important than our manager, so having the end user give feedback will stop what Marx would call alienation. (Lee, 2014)

Allowing teams to self-create is still rather unheard of, however, this type of Superleadership, allows teams to see the problem and self-assembly, which will also see them going through the team stages to performing a lot faster (if you don’t break them up again for another project). Once teams are together and empowered to design the correct process to match the work, set up a social contract on how they like to work, they will naturally want to sit together and socialise and only some minor ‘help’ would be needed to make them feel trusted.

I could go on but I think I will leave these thoughts out in the open, I have all the references below from some great studies and I have a heap more than I used for my Leadership assignments last week… so feel free to ask. Agile doesn’t stop social loafing but you can clearly see how the mindset is in line with all the latest theory on motivating and empowering team members. For all those in a FRagile environment, know that you are in line with the science and the autocratic leadership above you…. will realize that more trust and more empowerment will mean more delivery from emergent unknowns.

Agile promotes

1. Cross Functional Teams to deal with task variability
2. Co located teams to build team culture
3. Autonomous teams to self manage and create higher motivation
4. Task break down, clarity and visibility to ensure accountability
5. Customer feedback (product owner) to motivate
6. Traceability to end user to create a sense of purpose
7. Smaller teams to lessen the effect of hiding
8. Objective benefits.... no thats just me.... but it would help :)

References

Chen, F., Zhang, L., Latimer, J. (2014). How much has My Co-Worker Contributed? The Impact of Anonymity and Feedback on Social Loafing in Asynchronous Virtual Collaboration // International Journal of Information Management. Vol. 34, No. 5, pp. 652–659. doi: 10.1016/ j.ijinfomgt.2014.05.001

Woodman, T., Roberts, R., Hardy, L., Callow, N., Rogers, C. H. (2011). There is an “I” in Team: Narcissism and Social Loafing // Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. Vol. 82, No. 2, pp. 285–290. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02701367. 2011.10599756

Lee, P. Ch., Chen, Ch. M., Liou, K. T. (2015). Using Citizens’ Leadership Behaviors to Enhance Worker Motivation: Reducing Perceived Social Loafing in a Coproductive Tax Service Program // Public Performance & Management Review. Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 172–197. doi: 10.1080/15309576.2016.1071172.

Ferrante, C. J., Green, S. G., Forster, W. R. (2006). Getting More Out of Team Projects: Incentivizing Leadership to Enhance Performance // Journal of Management Education. Vol. 30, No. 6, pp. 788–797. doi: 10.1177/1052562906287968.

Omar, A. A., Lionel, P. R., Likoebe, M. M. (2010). Team Size, Dispersion, and Social Loafing in Technology-Supported Teams: A Perspective on the Theory of Moral Disengagement // Journal of Management Information Systems. Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 203–230. doi: 10.2753/ MIS0742-1222270109

Perry, S. J., Lorinkova, N. M., Hunter, E. M., Hubbard, A., McMahon, J. T. (2016). When does Virtuality Really “Work”? Examining the Role of Work–Family and Virtuality in Social Loafing // Journal of Management. Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 449–479. doi: 10.1177/0149206313475814.

Stark, E. M., Shaw, J. D., Duffy, M. K. (2007). Preference for Group Work, Winning Orientation, and Social Loafing Behavior in Groups // Group & Organization Management. Vol. 32, No. 6, pp. 699–723. doi: 10.1177/1059601106291130. 

George, J. M. (1992). Extrinsic and Intrinsic Origins of Perceived Social Loafing in Organizations // Academy of Management Journal. Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 191–202. doi: 10.2307/256478.

Jones, G. W., H?igaard, R., Peters, D. M. (2014). “Just Going Through the Motions..”: A Qualitative Exploration of Athlete Perceptions of Social Loafing in Training and Competition Contexts – Implications for Team Sport Coaches // International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching. Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 1067–1082. doi: 10.1260/1747- 9541.9.5.1067