Is Social Loafing Unethical?
As we discussed in this chapter, social loafing is one potential downside of working in
groups. Regardless of the type of task—from games of Tug of War to working on a group
projects—research suggests that when working in a group, most individuals contribute
less than if they were working on their own. Sometimes, these people are labeled
shirkers, because they don’t fulfill their responsibilities as group members. Other times,
social loafing is overlooked, and the industrious employees do the work alone to meet the
group’s performance goals. Either way, social loafing is an ethical dilemma.
Whether in class projects or in jobs we’ve held, most of us have experienced social
loafing, or shirking, in groups. And there may have even been times when we were guilty
of social loafing ourselves. We discussed earlier in this chapter some ways of
discouraging social loafing, such as limiting group size, holding individuals responsible
for their contributions, setting group goals, and providing “hybrid” incentives that reward
both individual and group performance. Although these strategies might help to reduce
the occurrence of social loafing, in many cases, it seems that people just try to work
around shirkers rather than motivate them to perform at higher levels.
Managers and employees must decide the ethics of social loafing acceptance. Managers
must determine what level of social loafing for groups and for individual employees will
be tolerated in terms of time wasted in nonproductive meetings, performance
expectations, and counterproductive work behaviors. Employees must decide what limits
to social loafing they will impose on themselves and what tolerance they have for social
loafers in their work groups.
This is a two-part forum post:
1. Provide an example of a time that you experienced (or exhibited!) social loafing in a
group. Indicate in your answer if this social loafing was communicated to the leader,
manager, teacher, etc.

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