Nchloy Copyright199句the Am n Pchol Social Loafing and Social Compensation:The Effects of Expectations of Co-Worker Performance Kigigbowa ere Unkery reh ha ted that people tendto ei orking colle S,d oasHakdp982,oreieheaie2opcohcahc mittees, sports teams s.quality contr le of a teacher who divides a class int c5hacobinethetersoomasneepndeLpG togeth r on a project cited in K ,1986nthc1880 y on a rope pulling ask.A ompared with a situation n whi of social lective tas sks (see ackson&Wil ms,1989) loafing in his le s,and studentsre to moderate ocial loafing can be as an e ample of students des ring to p them ced or by asing the identifiability or e in a la It is als ly,ho Harkins.1987:Williams.Harkins.).enhanc certain cire most will feel it n y to for othe ch thi too long Portionsof this article w ted att e1988 Nags Head Confe done the pr requisite course g bac in Chicag: Gardner,Katherine Gad.Katbe ne Kerr We also thank Rob an in ant role in s ice Kelly Norbert Ke by de nt of or reques X0434 570Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1991, Vol. 61, No. 4,570-581 Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/91/S3.00 Social Loafing and Social Compensation: The Effects of Expectations of Co-Worker Performance Kipling D. Williams University of Toledo Steven J. Karau Purdue University Previous research has suggested that people tend to engage in social loafing when working collec￾tively. The present research tested the social compensation hypothesis, which states that people will work harder collectively than individually when they expect their co-workers to perform poorly on a meaningful task. In 3 experiments, participants worked either collectively or coactively on an idea generation task. Expectations of co-worker performance were either inferred from participants' interpersonal trust scores (Experiment 1) or were directly manipulated by a confederate coworker's statement of either his intended effort (Experiment 2) or his ability at the task (Experiment 3). All 3 studies supported the social compensation hypothesis. Additionally, Experiment 3 supported the hypothesis that participants would not socially compensate for a poorly performing co-worker when working on a task that was low in meaningfulness. People often work together in groups to accomplish various goals. Many group tasks are collective tasks, in which members' contributions are pooled with those of their co-workers. Com￾mittees, sports teams, juries, marching bands, quality control teams, and government task forces are but a few examples of groups that combine their efforts to form a single product. Possi￾bly the first social psychological study, conducted in the 1880s by Ringelmann (cited in Kravitz & Martin, 1986), examined the effects of working collectively on a rope pulling task. At present, more than 55 studies have examined the effort ex￾pended by individuals when working on individual versus col￾lective tasks (see Jackson & Williams, 1989). The results of these studies indicate that people expend less effort collectively than coactively (working individually but in the presence of other co-workers), a phenomenon referred to as social loafing. A number of variables have been demonstrated to moderate social loafing. For example, social loafing can be reduced or eliminated by increasing the identifiability or eva￾luability of the individual members' contributions' (Szymanski & Harkins, 1987; Williams, Harkins, & Latane, 1981), enhanc￾Portions of this article were presented at the 1988 Nags Head Confer￾ence on Groups and Organizations; the 1988 96th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association convention in Atlanta, Georgia; the 1989 Midwestern Psychological Association convention in Chicago; and the 1990 Society for Experimental Social Psychology convention in Buffalo, New \brk. We thank Robert Flaherty, Lynn Gardner, Katherine Glad, Kather￾ine Kerr, Doug Langon, Jon Stroud, and Brad Thurmond for their assistance in running the experiments. We also thank Robert Arkin, Cathy Booth, Martin Bourgeois, Stephen Harkins, Irwin Horowitz, Jeffrey Jackson, Amy Kaylor, Janice Kelly, Norbert Kerr, Constantine Sedikides, and James Shepperd for their comments on this article or on presentations of this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kipling D. Williams, Department of Psychology, University of To￾ledo, Toledo, Ohio 43606, or requested through Internet: FAX0434 @UOFT02.TOLEDO.EDU. ing personal involvement with the task (Brickner, Harkins, & Ostrom, 1986), elevating the uniqueness of individual contribu￾tions (Harkins & Petty, 1982), or strengthening group cohesive￾ness (Williams, 1981). Consider an example of a teacher who divides a class into small groups and assigns them to work together on a project, hand in one paper, and share the grade. The social loafing litera￾ture would lead one to expect that each student's motivation and effort would decrease compared with a situation in which the teacher assigned individual papers and projects. In fact, the first author often uses this example as an illustration of social loafing in his lectures, and students remember how awful those types of assignments were because the "others in their groups always loafed." Ironically, and almost without exception, the students claimed that they were the ones left to "carry the load" for the others in their group. Of course, it is easy to view this response as an example of students desiring to present them￾selves in a favorable light. It is also likely, however, that certain people do exert more effort on collective tasks or that, under certain circumstances, most people will feel it necessary to shoulder the burden for others. Not too long ago in a class in which this type of assignment was given, a student who had done exceptionally well in the prerequisite course approached the instructor after class and, fighting back tears, stated that she knew she would end up doing all the work for the others in her 1 Some researchers (Harkins, 1987; Harkins & Szymanski, 1989; Kerr & Bruun, 1983) have defined social loafing as motivation loss in groups caused by reduced identifiability or evaluation. We agree that evaluation plays an important role in social loafing but choose not to define social loafing in these terms because (a) defining the phenome￾non in terms of its causes prevents, by definition, the discovery of new causes for the same effect; and (b) evidence suggests there are other causes of social loafing, such as redundancy of contribution (Harkins & Petty, 1982) and dispensability of effort (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). We prefer to adopt a less restrictive definition of social loafing consistent with the original formulation: the tendency to reduce one's effort when working collectively compared with individually on the same task. 570