Effect of Culture
In 1989, Christopher P. Earley hypothesized that social loafing would be mitigated in collectivist cultures that focus more on achievement of the group than the individual. He conducted a study in the United States and China, two polar opposites in terms of culture (with the U.S. being individualistic and China being collectivist), in order to determine if a difference in social loafing was present between the two types of cultures. Earley formed groups from both countries similar in demographics and in time spent with each other (participants in each of the groups had known each other for three to five weeks). Each group was tasked with completing various forms of paperwork similar to work they would be required to do in their profession. The paperwork was designed to take two to five minutes for each item, and the items were turned in to an assistant when completed so that no one could judge their work compared to others. Each participant was given 60 minutes to complete as many items as possible and was separated into either the high-accountability group, where they were told they needed to achieve a group goal, or a low-accountability group, where they were told they were to achieve a goal alone. They were also separated into high and low shared responsibility groups. It was found that, consistent with other studies, highly individualistic people performed more poorly on the task when there was high shared responsibility and low accountability than when there was high accountability. The collectivists, however, performed somewhat better on the task when high shared responsibility was present, regardless of how accountable they were supposed to be as compared to when they were working alone. This evidence shows that collectivist thinking eliminates the social loafing effect, and further evidence done from a similar study showed the effect was related to the collectivist thinking rather than the country, as individualistic Chinese workers did indeed show a social loafing effect.
Read more about this topic: Social Loafing
Famous quotes containing the words effect and/or culture:
“Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)