Exploring social facilitation in your team
In our teams, we need to be alert to when our teams are greater than the sum of their parts. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
One of the earliest and most repeated studies in social psychology looked into the concept of social loafing. The idea is that when people are part of a group that they are inclined to exert less effort than if they are working independently. This finding doesn't seem to be a victim of the replication crisis - over more than a century, studies have shown this phenomenon to hold up across a range of activities including pulling ropes, clapping and even shouting! Consistently, we can see people putting in less effort and the group being significantly less than the sum of its parts.
If this happened all the time, then teams we should abandon the idea of working together as teams.
Thankfully, research has also identified a related concept - social facilitation. This is the idea that an individual increases their effort and performance in the presence of others. This has also been studied and replicated consistently for a long time including experiments. With diverse activities such as cycling and word association, it has been demonstrated that the presence of others has been a useful factor in performance. I experience this with tasks like running or going to the gym - I'm far more likely to do it and do it better with someone else than solo. You can probably think of some examples when this happens for you.
Social facilitation is about the presence of others, but not necessarily working with them. Does that mean that we do tasks better independently with others in the vicinity? Sometimes - and this is where we could look to use co-located and asynchronous work if we use the framework from last week's post. There is also more nuance to it.
Recent research supports the fact that - in the right conditions - real teams are collectively more intelligent, more productive and more profitable than individuals or less cohesive groups. As Sandy Pentland from MIT points out in Harvard Business Review, "individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect."
It's possible to dive into this rabbit hole much deeper, but the important point to acknowledge is that both social loafing and social facilitation exist. If both of these outcomes are possible, the question to consider in our teams becomes "when", not "if".
In our teams, we need to be alert to when our teams are greater than the sum of their parts. What are the conditions that support this? How can we make it happen more often and tap into the benefits of teaming for individuals and organisations. How can we avoid the traps of social loafing (and other phenomena) that have the potential to make bringing people together an unrewarding experience for all involved.
Designing ways to minimise social loafing and encourage social facilitation are experiments that teams can be running constantly. Here are some questions to get you started:
When does your team find itself being less productive despite working together?
When is your team more productive because of working together?
On a personal level, which tasks tend to make you suffer from social loafing - and which tend to benefit from social facilitation?