Social Loafing | Conflict Management

Contents

Article 1: Introduction.        

Article 1: Review of the article.        

Article 2: Introduction.        

Article 2: Review of the article.        

Name of the research article – Effects of punishment threats on Social Loafing.

Name of the authors - Jill Kunishima, Kasi Welte and Dean Morier.

Article published on - March 2004.

Web link of the article - http://legacy.jyi.org/volumes/volume10/issue3/articles/kunishima.html

Article 1: Introduction.

This research studies how punishment-threats effect social loafing. Social loafing can be understood as the tendency for people to expend less effort on a given task when working in groups than when working alone.

This article starts about explaining Max Ringelmann’s experiments of “Rope pulling” and Latane et al (1979) experiment of people clapping. In both these experiments when tested individually the performance was better than it was for the same individual in a group.

The article also mentions about “allocation strategy”.  In the Harkins et al. (1980) experiment he notes that social loafing may occur when participants believe they will be performing two tasks, one as a group and the other alone. The reasoning was that the participants were conserving their energy by not performing at their highest level in the group so that they would perform at their best on the individual task.

Article 1: Review of the article.

This article revolves around how punishment-threats affect Social Loafing. There is a theory called Social Compensation proposed by Williams and Karau which explains that an individual might work harder in a group because he or she fears that he or she may be punished for the less than adequate performance of others in his or her group. The article refers to another literature on punishment threats on social loafing i.e. Miles – Greenburg (1993) swimming experiment. The researchers had members of high school swim teams swim a 100-yard freestyle race as either an individual swimmer or as a member of a four-person relay team. The results of this experiment were when in no punishment scenario individual swimmer swam well in the 100-yard freestyle compared to his or her performance in the relay. However in the punishment (extra laps) scenario there was no significant difference in the performance in the 100-yard freestyle and relay.

Now let us look at the experiment conducted by the authors of this research article. Eighty-two undergraduate and graduate students at Mills College participated in an idea-generating experiment. Of the 82 participants, 76 were female, and six were male. The average age of participants was 20.78 with a range of 18 to 32.

The participants in the study were assigned to four different conditions i.e. Individual punishment, Individual – no punishment, group – punishment and group – no punishment. The goal of the experiment was for the participants to generate 34 used for the object “knife” in 12 minutes.  The participants who were assigned to the punishment conditions were told that, if they failed to generate the prescribed number of uses for the object, their data would not be processed and that they would have to stay back and repeat the experiment with another object. The participants who were assigned to the group conditions were told that their answers would be combined with the other group members and they had to come up with 34 uses as a group. After the participants completed this task, they were given questionnaires that allowed them to rate their amount of effort and the importance of reaching the goal on a 10 point likert scale.

Participants in the punishment condition generated more uses for the object than participants in the no – punishment condition. Participants who believed they were working alone also generated more uses for the object than those who believed they were working in a group. This result is in accordance with previous studies on social loafing theory, but the experimenters were unable to find that punishment threats reduce social loafing.[pic 1]

Participants under threat of punishment believed they expended greater effort on the task than those who were not under threat of punishment, as indicated by ratings on a likert scale of 10 to the questionnaire given after completion of task. Also, participants who believed they were working in a group did not feel they expended less effort on the task than those who were working individually.[pic 2]

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Participants in the punishment condition also placed more importance on the task than participants in the no – punishment condition. Also, individuals rated the task more important than participants in the group

In conclusion, the researchers found that participants in the punishment condition performed better at the task regardless of whether they were working individually or in a group. They also found that participants who were working individually performed better than those who were working in a group, which lends credibility to the social loafing theory. However, they did not obtain results that indicated that individuals in the group condition who were working under threat of punishment performed better than those in the group condition who were not under threat of punishment.

Name of the research article – Functional and dysfunctional conflict in the context of marketing and sales.

Name of the authors - Graham R Massey & Philip L Dawes.

Article published on – 2004

Web link of the article - http://www.wlv.ac.uk/media/wlv/pdf/uwbs_04-WP009-04-Massey-Dawes.pdf

Article 2: Introduction.

This research paper explores functional and dysfunctional interpersonal conflicts in the context of marketing and sales.

Most of us understand that now a day the work natures in companies are becoming more collaborative. To complete a job or a task Cross-functional communication between different departments within an organization becomes inevitable. This research paper tests a model of the antecedents of two types of conflict in the context of the Marketing and Sales. The authors have used two theoretical perspectives to develop their model. The two theoretical perspectives are “interaction approach” and “theory of bureaucracy”. The interaction approach seeks to explain the nature and patterns of interactions between personnel in different units. Theory of bureaucracy examines optimal structures and administrative systems for organisations with differentiated functions.