Author Verona Bardhoku

Submission Institute of Innovation Management

Thesis Supervisor Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert. J. Breitenecker

Co-Supervisor Mag. Andreas Krawinkler

SOCIAL LOAFING IN November 2020 MULTICULTURAL TEAMS: A qualitative perspective on social loafing tendencies in multicultural teams of international business students.

Master’s Thesis to confer the academic degree of

Master of Science Global Business in the Joint Master’s Program

Global Business – Canada/Taiwan

JOHANNES KEPLER UNIVERSITY LINZ Altenberger Straße 69 4040 Linz, Austria jku.at

SWORN DECLARATION

I hereby declare under oath that the submitted Master’s Thesis has been written solely by me without any third-party assistance, information other than provided sources or aids have not been used and those used have been fully documented. Sources for literal, paraphrased and cited quotes have been accurately credited.

The submitted document here present is identical to the electronically submitted text document.

Linz, November 2020

Verona Bardhoku

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Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor Univ.-Prof. Dr. Robert Breitenecker and my co-supervisor Mag. Andreas Krawinkler. Thank you for your guidance and advice during the time I was writing this thesis. Thank you for the fast collaboration and answering all my questions.

Further, I would like to express my appreciation for all the interviewees, especially the ones who did not know me and still accepted to share their experiences and thoughts with me. Everyone gave me impactful insights and helped me make this thesis possible.

As of last, I would like to thank my family for their financial and emotional support during my whole studies, and especially during the time I was writing this thesis.

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Abstract

The aim of this master thesis is to unveil the impact of culture on social loafing. With increasing global interaction, understanding cultural diversity and its implications have become critical in successfully navigating multicultural environments. To investigate this research question, the author conducted semi-structured interviews with nine Global Business Program students. A qualitative research method is applied to evaluate these interviews, with the help of qualitative research software. Particularly, this research scrutinizes the general factors that stimulate and shrink the presence of social loafing in multicultural teams. Particular attention was paid to exploring the impact of culture. This research concluded that multicultural teams are affected by the same factors as monocultural teams; however, there are faced with additional influencing aspects. This research did not get results that support the hypothesis that social loafing is more present in specific cultures than others. Nonetheless, it was concluded that culture does impact the perception of the expected contribution in a team, thus, leading to multicultural team members putting different levels of effort.

Key words: social loafing, freeriding, teams, multicultural, international, performance

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction...... 8 1.1. Problem definition ...... 9 1.2. Research gap and motivation ...... 10 1.3. Research questions ...... 11 1.4. Structure of the thesis ...... 13 2. Literature review ...... 15 2.1. Social loafing ...... 16 2.2. Outcomes of social loafing ...... 18 2.2.1. Social compensation ...... 18 2.2.2. Sucker effect ...... 18 2.2.3. Freeriding and shirking ...... 19 2.2.4. Performance ...... 19 2.3. Factors that increase social loafing ...... 21 2.3.1. Team size...... 21 2.3.2. Task characteristics ...... 22 2.3.3. Team composition ...... 23 2.3.4. Expectations of others behavior ...... 29 2.4. Factors that minimize social loafing ...... 30 2.4.1. Social connections and friendships ...... 30 2.4.2. Rewards ...... 31 2.4.3. Team cohesion and team identity ...... 33 2.4.4. Team composition ...... 33 2.4.5. Self-efficacy and collective efficacy ...... 35 2.4.6. Peer-evaluation and feedback ...... 36 2.4.7. Social comparison ...... 37 2.5. Social loafing in international teams ...... 38 2.6. Summary social loafing and framework ...... 41 3. Methodology ...... 44 3.1. Research method ...... 44 3.2. Interview sample and data collection ...... 45 3.3. Conducting the analysis ...... 47 4. Results and analysis ...... 48 4.1. Sub-question 1: What leads to social loafing in multicultural teams?...... 50 4.1.1. Team size...... 50 4.1.2. Task characteristics ...... 51 4.1.3. Team composition ...... 52

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4.1.4. Expectations of others behavior ...... 55 4.2. Sub-question 2: How to avoid social loafing in multicultural teams? ...... 57 4.2.1. Team composition ...... 57 4.2.2. Peer review and feedback ...... 61 4.2.3. Social comparison ...... 62 4.2.4. Rewards ...... 63 4.2.5. Team cohesion ...... 64 4.2.6. Social connections ...... 65 4.2.7. Self-efficacy ...... 66 4.2.8. Additional factors avoiding social loafing ...... 67 4.3. Sub-question 3: How does cultural diversity influence social loafing? ...... 69 4.4. Additional codes ...... 73 4.4.1. Additional factors influencing socia loafing ...... 73 4.4.2. Social compensation or sucker effect: performance outcomes ...... 75 4.5. Summary analysis and revised framework ...... 79 5. Discussion...... 82 5.1. Sub-question 1: What leads to social loafing in multicultural teams ...... 82 5.2. Sub-question 2: How to avoid social loafing in multicultural teams? ...... 85 5.3. Sub-question 3: How does cultural diversity influence social loafing? ...... 88 6. Conclusion, limitations and future research ...... 90 7. Reference List ...... 92 8. Appendix ...... 102

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Table of figures

Figure 1: Hofstede's cultural dimensions model ...... 39 Figure 2: Framework social loafing ...... 41 Figure 3: List of all coded segments ...... 48 Figure 4: Word cloud ...... 49 Figure 5: Framework social loafing in international teams ...... 79

Table of tables

Table 1: Interviewee overview ...... 47 Table 2: Code system sub-question 1 ...... 50 Table 3: Code system sub-question 2 ...... 57 Table 4: Code system sub-question 3 ...... 69 Table 5: Additional codes ...... 73

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1. Introduction

Since the 1970’, small unit teamwork has received significant attention from the academic community (Salas et al., 2008). Even after five decades of research on team dynamics, team performance, and effectiveness, it still continues to be a substantially researched topic. The underlying reason for that is because the way teams work is continually moving along with the fast-paced changing environment. Exploring teamwork is now more critical than ever, as globalization and technology development have added extra layers of complexity to the way work is organized (Halverson & Tirmizi, 2008). This complexity increases even more when considering that in the global world, employees have to form teams and complete tasks with team members from all around the world. Teams that are composed of people that come from different cultural backgrounds face additional challenges compared to the teams that have members of only one culture. These extra challenges usually are connected to the difficulties in communication as team members have different perceptions and. Hence, while working in multicultural teams, there is an increased probability of having misunderstandings; decision-making becomes more complicated and it might get harder to manage conflict.

In general, the majority of teams do not reach their optimal level of effectiveness (Burch & Anderson, 2004). In multicultural teams, this phenomenon is even more emphasized. By simply putting together individuals that stem from different nationalities does not immediately translate into more effectiveness. Although cultural diversity sometimes facilitates the effectiveness of a team, in some cases, it can pose a barrier to it (Jang, 2017). Cultural differences and heterogeneity make it more challenging for teams to establish effective group processes (Behfar et al., 2006), and because of problems such as conflicts and misunderstandings, it can lead to lower team performance (Matveev & Milter, 2004). The factors that hinder the multicultural team’s synergy and effectiveness can be many. Literature has identified problems such as communication (Halverson & Tirmizi, 2008), conflict (Earley & Gibson, 2002), interpersonal relationships (Ghoshal et al.,1994), which create a roadblock for the effectiveness of multinational teams.

Among others, one particular behavior that disrupts team effectiveness and performance is social loafing. Social loafing is the decrease in individual performance when other people are present (Latané et al., 1979). Another more opportunistic form of social loafing is called freeriding, and it happens when a team member reaps the shared benefits from the work of other team members, despite decreasing its individual performance (Comer, 1995; Ruël et al., 2003). Although freeriding in itself does not automatically mean lower performance for the whole team, the likelihood of decreased effectiveness is higher, as team members who have to do more work tend also to get demotivated (Ruël et al., 2003). This particular occurrence is called the “sucker effect”, where

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team members decrease their input after noticing that other members are not performing at their optimal level (Kerr, 1983). The opposite of the sucker effect is called social compensation, which implies that other team members will increase their effort when they predict that one member will to perform poorly (Williams & Karau, 1991). The causes and reasons for social loafing and freeriding behavior are many, but the crucial one is that the evaluation and compensation are usually based on the overall performance of the team rather than the individual input (Holmstrom, 1982; De Paola et al., 2019). This means that it is not observable with certainty what contribution each member gave during the whole team process, so some of the members might use that to their advantage to benefit from others. While freeriding might emerge in all types of teams, there is an increased probability of observing it in multicultural teams, as problems such as communication, conflict, and misunderstandings are more likely to occur when team members come from different backgrounds (Halverson & Tirmizi, 2008; Earley & Gibson, 2002; Ghoshal et al.,1994).

1.1. Problem definition

Teams outperform individuals (Katzenbach & Smith,1993); therefore, they have become the modus operandi for completing tasks, and they have become the heart of organizational operations (Marquardt & Horvath, 2001). Hence, understanding team-member behavior and what boosts or hinders team performance is beneficial for companies, as it can give more insight into how to structure work better and how to compose teams in such a way that they reach their maximal potential. Although much is already known about how teams function, a large proportion of teams fail to meet the expectations and reach their highest level of effectiveness, which is assessed by measuring productivity, commitment, performance, creativity, participation, and team member satisfaction (Burch & Anderson, 2004). Moreover, in today’s globalized economy, it is very likely to encounter teams composed of individuals coming from different regions of the world, which adds an extra layer of complexity to the team’s dynamics. The cultural composition of teams has not always been as diverse as it is today. On the one hand, in culturally diverse teams, the members provide more perspectives to solving problems (Maznevski, 1994) and higher creativity (Gassmann, 2001). On the other hand, the issues of monocultural teams can be more emphasized when a team has members from different nationalities. In order to understand how to solve the problems of teams as a whole, one can start by understanding the individual members. Preparing individuals to become adapted and effective in their roles as team members is of great importance (Halverson & Tirmizi, 2008).

Social loafing behavior has received much attention since the Ringlemann’s rope pulling experiment. Ringlemann noticed in a simple rope pulling experiment that while group size would

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increase, the individual performance of the members would decrease (Kravitz & Martin, 1986). Later on, this phenomenon was studied by other researchers and spread in different disciplines such as social psychology, education literature, management, and economics (Ruël et al., 2003; Kidwell et al., 2007). All these streams focus on several different factors influencing the withholding effort behavior in teams, starting from external factors such as task features to internal influencing factors such as team member personality. Nonetheless, although international teams are becoming quite prominent in the current working environment, this phenomenon has received little attention in the context of international teams. Most studies reflect the behavior of team members predominantly in western cultures, and very few studies focus on analyzing this type of behavior in eastern cultures. Earley (1989) and Klehe & Anderson (2007) focused on studying respectively the impact of two cultural dimensions, collectivism and power distance, on social loafing behavior and concluded that culture does make a difference when it comes to the way team members behave while working collectively. However, studies from other researchers such as Gabrenya et al. (1983) and Jassawalla et al. (2009) contradict those findings, pointing out that social loafing is present in all types of cultures. Due to this inconsistency in conclusions, it is crucial to examine again whether social loafing is more present in international teams, and if so, how does it impact team member dynamics and performance.

1.2. Research gap and motivation

Although social loafing and multicultural teams in itself have been researched extensively over the past decades, there are still areas to be explored, which are currently not particularly prominent in the literature. Social loafing in association with multicultural teams has only been scratched in the surface, and there are not many studies fully exploring and explaining this phenomenon. Moreover, even the existing research has been mainly focused on the American culture, indicating that in other research contexts, the research results might vary.

First of all, although there is enough literature that discusses freeriding and social loafing in psychology and economics, there is evidently a lack of richness of research for this phenomenon in the context of management and multicultural teams. Social loafing in multicultural teams has been researched, for example by Clark & Baker (2011); however, their findings seem to be inconsistent regarding the influence of culture on freeriding behavior. Further, social loafing has been studied in the cultural context, trying to determine whether a particular culture is more prone to social loafing or not, such as for example by Earley (1989) and Gabrenya et al. (1983), however, indicating inconsistent results. The empirical evidence of freeriding in teams is accompanied by mixed results (De Paola et al., 2019). The limited literature connecting freeriding to multicultural

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teams and the controversy of the existing empirical evidence constitutes a reasonable interest in exploring this topic more in-depth and therefore is a research motivation for this thesis.

Second of all, social loafing in itself is a very complex phenomenon, and the factors that impact this behavior are also interlinked with each other. Different studies have been done to understand which these factors are, and most of them are concerned either with the team and task characteristics or with the team composition in terms of personality traits. These studies, however, also display inconsistencies, especially the ones regarding team member’s personality. Most of the studies come to an agreement that team size, task interdependencies, the type of task increase the tendency to social loaf. However, regarding personality, such as the studies done analyzing the Big 5 personality traits present contradictory findings. Some of them acknowledge the effect that personality traits have on teamwork, team performance and social loafing, while others find that they have no effect.

As of last, according to my observations and my knowledge to date, most of the current literature consists of quantitative studies or different experimental designs in laboratory settings. Little attention has been put on exploring the problem of social loafing in multicultural teams by following a qualitative approach. Observing this phenomenon from the perspective of team-members themselves in a qualitative manner might cast light on new perspectives. Moreover, it would give an insight into how team members themselves perceive social loafing, which might lead to observing more explanatory factors for it. Furthermore, by asking team members in a qualitative way, it would be possible to get awareness on why in some cases, team members tend to compensate, whereas in others, they reduce their own effort when they realize that other team members are defecting.

1.3. Research questions

The main aim of this thesis is to integrate the literature on multicultural teams and the one on social loafing and observe where these two are conjunct with each other. Hence, the main research question of this thesis is:

How does cultural impact social loafing behavior in multicultural teams?

Social loafing can lead to a deterioration of team effectiveness and possibly badly influence team dynamics. Thus, a better understanding of this phenomenon will give more insights into the ways to avoid it. Social loafing is a fairly broad topic and incorporates three different layers and literature

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streams. Therefore, to aid in answering the research question of this thesis, it is necessary to separate it into three sub-questions, which assure better and more detailed analysis to enable a more accurate assessment of the effects of cultural diversity in multinational teams in regard to social loafing. The sub-questions are categorized as follows:

Sub-question 1: What leads to social loafing in teams?

This first sub-question is concerned with understanding the factors that lead to a social loafing behavior in team. By analyzing why individuals tend to withhold their effort, one can understand whether this phenomenon is more related to the individual team members, or whether team dynamics or task in itself can lead to social loafing. The current literature predicts several factors that lead team members to withhold effort; nonetheless, the existing studies are mostly based on monocultural teams, leaving the cultural element outside of the equation. In order to understand social loafing in international teams, it is crucial first to analyze what impacts it even in monocultural teams. Therefore, the first part of the analysis does not differentiate between the literature for monocultural or multicultural teams. Further, during the analysis, special attention will be paid to the multicultural component. This will lead to understanding whether multicultural teams are impacted by the same factors as monocultural teams. Moreover, since the literature review and the analysis will have a similar structure, it will be possible to compare the literature findings with the obtained results of this research. Moreover, through the analysis will be possible to understand whether there are additional factors that influence social loafing in multicultural teams.

Sub-question 2: Which are the prominent factors that decrease social loafing?

The literature identifies several factors that influence freeriding behavior, but as mentioned earlier, these factors vary, and moreover, there are inconsistencies about their particular effects. The primary aim of the thesis is to observe and deduce how does social loafing behavior occurs. However, it is also essential to understand which are the factors that minimize it. The second sub- question is concerned with discovering the factors which negatively influence social loafing and motivate team members to put more effort. The primary idea in this sub-question is to understand whether the factors that reduce social loafing are connected more to the team and task structure itself, or whether they are embedded in the personality of the team members. Understanding which one of these factors holds more weight in determining whether a team member will withhold effort or not is particularly crucial, as it will shed more light on the importance of the individual culture when it comes to social loafing. Similarly, as in the first sub-question, the current literature on social loafing will be analyzed, and it will be compared to the results of this research.

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Sub-question 3: How does cultural diversity influence social loafing?

When talking about multinational teams, the differentiation factor is the diverse national background of the composing members of the team. While there should be caution when assuming that different nationalities automatically mean different cultures, for the purpose of facilitating this thesis, this assumption will be taken into consideration. Monocultural teams do not face the same communication issues as multicultural teams, as the team members share similar understandings of language and behavior, thus minimizing conflicts. On the contrary, in multicultural teams, communication presents one of the major issues (Halverson & Tirmizi, 2008), which might then lead to other problems such as demotivation, lack of desire to get involved in the team tasks, or a feeling of not being part of the team. These behaviors, in turn, impact performance and can be determinant on the decision to contribute or withhold effort. Providing a specific answer to this question will be crucial in answering the broader topic, as it will indicate whether the differences in culture do indeed affect the behavior of team members with respect to social loafing behavior.

1.4. Structure of the thesis

This thesis contains two main parts, which are structured as follows: The first part includes two chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to the topic and the research question, including the motivation for tackling this question. Chapter two explains more thoroughly what social loafing is and the background history of the research on this topic in the field of social psychology. Further, there is an explanation of related concepts such as, for example, freeriding, social compensation, shirking and the impact of social loafing on performance. Moreover, this chapter presents a detailed review of the literature, which is structured based on the three sub-questions introduced in the first chapter. This examination of the literature presents all the factors that positively impact social loafing, namely, an increase in these factors lead to a higher probability of encountering social loafing in a team. Further, it explores the factors that negatively impact social loafing, that is, the factors that decrease the tendency to loaf if they are present in a team. Lastly, there is a summary of the literature on social loafing in multicultural teams and an examination of the cultural factors on the tendency to loaf.

The second part is composed of four chapters, starting with chapter three, an elaboration of the research method and the research design. Moreover, there will be an explanation of why qualitative research is the most suited research method for the examination of the research question. Further, this chapter contains a description of the interviewee selection and how the analysis of the qualitative interviews will unfold. For the purpose of this analysis, the author will

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use a qualitative research software called MAXQDA. The fourth chapter demonstrates the results of the analysis. It is structured in a similar way as the review of the existing research on the topic. The first part of this chapter shows the responses of the interviewees on the factors that increase the likelihood of encountering social loafing in a team. The second part includes the statements on the ways that social loafing can be minimized. In the third part, there is a display of the responses that connect social loafing to the concept of culture, and lastly, there is a summary of the analysis. The last two chapters present a discussion on the findings that this analysis revealed and a comparison with the current literature, and a conclusion about the results of this thesis.

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2. Literature review

In the literature, there is usually a distinction between groups and teams. A group represents a structure that can influence and alternate the attitudes and behaviors of its members, as these adopt the norms and values of the group and rely on the given group to draw subjective comparisons for themselves and to find psychological meaningfulness (Turner, 1987). Teams have different definitions. For example, Katzenbach & Smith (1993) define teams as a small group of people who possess complementary skills, are committed to a common purpose, set certain performance goals and, work together to achieve these goals while holding each other fully and jointly accountable for the results. According to Rousseau et al. (2006), a work team consists of a formal and permanent whole of at least two individuals who work interdependently and are collectively in charge of the accomplishment of one or several tasks defined by the organization. Multicultural teams have the same characteristics as other teams, with the distinction that the team members must come from two or more different national or cultural backgrounds (Earley & Gibson, 2002). One more specific definition is given by (Marquardt & Horvath, 2001, pg. 4): „A group of people of different nationalities working together on a common project across cultures and time zones for extended periods of time. The global team is expected to achieve an outcome that will either serve a widespread set of customers, solve problems in many areas simultaneously, or have a significant impact on increasing or sustaining the organization’s profitability and service.”

Since teams have become the core way that organizations operate (Marquardt & Horvath, 2001) and firms rely on them to make crucial decisions (Alnuaimi et al., 2010), it is crucial to understand how they could reach their optimal level of efficiency and what challenges they face during their collaboration. One of the significant drawbacks in teamwork is the phenomenon of social loafing, which indicates the decrease of performance for individual members of the team while working collectively as compared to when working alone (Latané et al., 1979). The withholding of contribution in a team might affect not only team performance but also team dynamics, work processes and might also impact the motivation of the rest of the team members. Therefore, understanding this concept and the underlying factors that affect it is beneficial for creating high functioning teams which can profit from synergy effects. In the upcoming sections, there will be an in-depth introduction of the concept of social loafing and the factors which foster or hinder this type of behavior in teams.

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2.1. Social loafing

“Clap your hands and shout out loud” sounds more like a cheerleading call than a hint for psychological behavior. Latané et al. (1979) designed an experiment to see if they could replicate Ringlemann’s earlier findings concerning individual effort while working in a group. Ringlemann conducted in 1913 a rope pulling experiment and noticed that the more people engaged in the game, the individual effort of each one would decrease. The experiment of Latané et al. (1979) required the partakers to complete an easy task, to make noise by screaming and by clapping their hands. What Latané et al. (1979) found confirmed Ringlemann’s findings. They noticed that with an increased number of participants, the individual efforts would decrease, and thus the overall performance would deviate from what they anticipated. They excepted the performance outcomes to be at least equal to the sum of the individual efforts, not considering any synergy effects. However, what they found in their experiment was that contrary to these assumptions, since the individual performance of each participant would decrease, the overall performance also fell. They called this phenomenon social loafing and defined it as “a decrease in individual effort due to social presence of other persons” (Latané et al., 1979, p.823).

When individuals work on a collective task, their outputs are combined with the outputs of the other team members (Rutte, 2003), thus generating an overall team output. When a team output must be produced, team members must cooperate in order to complete the interdependent tasks (Wagner, 1995). In such situations, when one must be in the presence of others and needs to interact with them, the behavior of the individual can change drastically compared to how they would behave if they were alone. For example, Zajonc (1965) summarized literature that analyzed behavior in the presence of others. One possible outcome is social facilitation, which indicates that an individual increases its emotional arousal, it’s drive levels and learning potential in the presence of others (Zajonc, 1965). However, the presence of others can also cause a contrary effect to social facilitation, namely, social loafing. Especially when individuals need to complete interdependent tasks, where the exact contributions of each individual are not measurable, there is a tendency for those individuals to have a loss of motivation (Waller, 1996) and, therefore, not exercise the maximum possible effort. Social loafing is considered to be predominantly negative for a team, and it might lead to productivity loss. Although researchers have obtained consistent evidence about the existence of social loafing, naming the causes for it has been illusive (Frash et al., 2004) as the factors influencing this phenomenon are many.

The underlying causes and the consequences of withholding effort are discussed in social psychology, in educational literature (Ruël et al., 2003) and in economics and management literature (Kidwell et al., 2007). In economics this concept has been researched in terms of the

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agency theory, which denotes a relationship between a principal and agent, and this relationship is characterized by an information asymmetry (Shapiro, 2005). Because the principals do not have all the information that agents have, agents might develop a tendency to act in self-interest. Thus, the agent might fail to put the agreed-upon effort (Eisenhardt, 1989). This concept is called moral hazard and denotes “the problem of inducing agents to supply proper amounts of productive inputs when their actions cannot be observed and contracted for directly” (Holmstrom, 1982, p. 324). The term moral hazard was firstly used in economics to build models that describe the choices of insurance policies depending on expected medical expenditures (Mirrlees, 1999).

Social psychology is predominantly concerned with the influence of groups on individual behavior (Gagné & Zuckerman, 1999). Therefore, the concept of withholding effort has been widely studied in this domain, and the representatives are for example Latané et al. (1979), Kerr & Bruun (1983), Williams & Karau (1991). In social psychology, as mentioned in the paragraphs above, the phenomenon has been called social loafing and indicates the reduction of effort while other people are involved. The domain of social psychology is mostly concerned with studying social loafing based on the team composition and the personality composition of the team members. One of the leading frameworks used in this domain to analyze the freeriding behavior based on personality is the Big 5 Personality Traits, which includes five different dimensions of personality for individuals.

In educational literature the phenomenon has been researched for example by Morris & Hayes (1997) and Jassawalla et al. (2009). This literature stream is fundamentally concerned with exploring the phenomenon of withholding effort within teams in academic settings. These studies mainly contribute to the practice and theory by analyzing the underlying reasons why students tend to loaf and by giving suggestions on how to better organize teamwork.

In management literature, Jones (1984) for example studies the phenomenon among employees in work settings. While social psychology focuses more on the individual reasons for loafing, the management literature focuses on understanding how team design and task characteristics influence the propensity to loaf.

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2.2. Outcomes of social loafing

The existence of loafers within a team might lead to various outcomes, which are mediated and influenced by the unique conditions in which each team operates. On the one hand, social loafing might cause other team members to withhold input, but on the other hand, it can also cause them to increase their input in order to achieve the team’s goals (Schippers, 2014). Other terms used in relation to social loafing are freeriding, social compensation, sucker effect, shirking, social facilitation, deadbeat. All these concepts are closely related to withholding effort; however, they differ slightly in the circumstances that they happen.

2.2.1. Social compensation

One of the possible outcomes of social loafing is social compensation, which denotes that team members may actually increase their input in the team task in order to compensate for the other in their group who are loafing (Williams & Karau, 1991; McKinlay et al., 1999). Williams & Karau (1991) present two possible explanations for this effect. First, they imply that social compensation might happen when there is a general lack of trust in the other group members, which means that it is expected that they will perform poorly. Indeed, they found that the participants of their study tended to compensate when they believed that others would loaf and tended to loaf with a co- worker who worked hard. Second, they advocate that team members compensate when for them individually, for any specific reason, the team output is important to these members. McKinlay et al. (1999) point to group cohesiveness as a reason for social compensation, meaning, when individuals feel like a member of the group and the group membership is important to them, then they will compensate when others loaf. This might be the case, especially when team members feel like the members who are not delivering the expected outcome have low abilities rather than they are deliberately withholding effort (Taggar & Neubert (2004). Clark & Baker (2011) also find traces of social compensation in their study of multicultural teams. They argue that the reason for social compensation might be reinforced by the desire to reach maximum output. For example, in student teams where some of the students lack the proper knowledge, such as language, the other team members will compensate for their lack of effort because they want themselves to achieve a higher grade for the projects.

2.2.2. Sucker effect

The other side of the coin is termed “sucker effect” and was introduced by Dawes (1980). When team members believe that others will defect, they may feel that it is necessary to defect themselves in order to avoid a big loss (Dawes, 1980). In terms of teamwork, the sucker effect

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happens when team members are unwilling to work harder to reach the team outcomes when some of the members withhold their effort (Kerr, 1983), as they fear that others will benefit from their efforts (Schnake, 1991). According to Kerr (1983) there are three reasons why people would like to avoid being the “sucker” of the group by working extra to deliver more than they would initially need to. First, he argues that the sucker effect would violate the equity norms, which means that others would not like to receive the same reward as those who worked less than them. Second, he discusses that the sucker effect might violate social responsibility and the norm of reciprocity. That is, team members would feel that each team member is obligated to contribute and to reciprocate since each contribution benefits the whole time. Third, Kerr (1983) reasons that if the “suckers” were to encourage this type of behavior by working harder, they would invite others to exploit them further.

2.2.3. Freeriding and shirking

In the field of economics, Stigler (1974) defines freeriding as the failure of individuals to take part in collectively profitable activities in the absence of coercion or the right motivation. While social loafing in teams happens when individuals reduce their effort, freeriding occurs when the member of the group who reduces effort is still able to obtain the benefits of the group membership without making a proportional contribution for these benefits (Albanese & Van Fleet, 1985). Hence, freeriding is considered to be a more opportunistic kind of social loafing (Ruël et al., 2003). Shirking describes a similar phenomenon. Alchian & Demsetz (1972) pointed out the concept of shirking while analyzing leisure as part of the utility function of individuals. They note that when there are several members in a team, each one would have the incentive to defect as they would want to increase their average amount of leisure time, resulting in a lowered productivity of the whole team. This happens when the employer cannot detect this kind of behavior at zero cost (Alchian & Demsetz, 1972). Shirking is generally used to describe the withholding of effort in individual settings while freeriding considers team settings (Kidwell & Bennett, 1993). Kidwell & Bennett (1993) summarized shirking, freeriding and social loafing into one concept and called the propensity to withhold effort (PWE) which stresses that individuals will put less than their full effort in a job-related task. The withholding of effort can be demonstrated in several ways, such as for example delivering incomplete tasks, not contributing time, not taking risks and sharing responsibilities or not showing one’s skills hoping that others will compensate (Felps et al., 2006).

2.2.4. Performance

While talking about social loafing it is important to make a differentiation whether it concerns only the behavior of team members deflecting and skipping their responsibilities during a team task, or whether this concept gives information about the overall performance of a team. As previously

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mentioned, social loafing gives rise for two types of behavior, social compensation and the sucker effect. These behaviors are completely opposite to one another, as the first one suggests that team members will tend to contribute more when they experience that other team members are withholding their effort, whereas the other one suggests that team members will become more demotivated and also decrease their own contribution when they notice that the other team members are withholding their effort. Social compensation might prevent the decrease of the group performance (McKinlay et al., 1999), as the tasks would still be completed by the remaining team members. However, in case that the sucker effect takes place, the overall performance of the team would decline (Schnake, 1991), as all members would be withholding their contribution to the task. Consequently, the performance of the team will fluctuate, depending on which one of these effects takes place.

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2.3. Factors that increase social loafing

Social loafing in teams can be triggered by a variety of factors. In the literature, the focus is placed on two directions, namely, group design elements and individual differences (Shaw et al., 2000). Group design considers factors such as group size, task characteristics, reward systems, surface- level composition factors while, individual differences are more focused on the personal characteristics of the team members such as, for example, deep-level composition variables. In the following section there will be an analysis of each one of these factors and the relation they hold towards social loafing.

2.3.1. Team size

The benefits of increased group size are numerous. A larger number of group members is able to generate more ideas, generate different perspectives and display increased creativity in comparison to individuals alone or smaller teams. However, there are also drawbacks, increased team size might also amplify the prevalence of social loafing behavior. As more members partake in a team, anonymity builds up and the individual contribution of each one of them becomes less recognizable (Liden et al., 2004). Valacich et al. (1995) found in their study that in larger groups, the individual contribution of the members decreased as group size continued increasing. Consequently, increased team size makes the team more vulnerable to freeriding, which in turn might affect the performance of the team and impede it to reach its goals.

The literature identifies multiple factors that might contribute to decreased motivation and increased propensity for social loafing in larger teams. Most of these factors are directly or indirectly connected to the “visibility” of owns contribution and to the logistic of synchronization in larger teams. For example, Alnuaimi et al. (2010) show that three particular mediators impact social loafing in bigger teams. First, there is a diffusion of responsibility. Individuals in larger teams contribute less as they feel that they are personally less responsible for achieving the team’s goals (Alnuaimi et al., 2010; Valacich et al.,1995). Moreover, with the increased size, the contribution of each member becomes less noticeable, which leads group members to feel like there is no perceptible difference whether they contribute or not (He, 2009), which in turn makes freeriding more probable (Albanese & Van Fleet, 1985). Similarly, in larger groups, the praise of working hard for each individual becomes lower (Kerr & Bruun, 1983), which transmits the feeling that the individual work is not recognized and properly rewarded by the supervisors. Second, Alnuaimi et al. (2010) identify the “dehumanization” effect, which happens when individuals perceive the connections to be less personal and become less concerned with the feelings and thought of group members. In such a case, the propensity to engage in social loafing behavior increases, as the team members do not take into consideration the feelings of their peers. Third, in larger teams,

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individuals are more prone to blaming each other for their own freeriding behavior (Alnuaimi et al. (2010)). This is called the attribution of blame effect.

Further factors that increase social loafing in larger teams are connected to the organization. Bacon et al. (1998) attribute the production loss of larger groups to the lack of coordination and increased difficulties in communication among the team members. While in smaller teams, it is easier to reach the individual members, and everyone has their space to share their ideas and contribution, larger teams find these issues to be more challenging and complex.

2.3.2. Task characteristics

Regardless of whether a task requires physical or cognitive effort, social loafing is present (Swain, 1996). Task characteristics determine how effortlessly employee behavior can be supervised and evaluated (Jones, 1984). The type of task has a greater impact on the propensity to loaf, be that connected to the way the task itself is structured or to the way the task is shared or interconnected to other tasks in a team. The exact characteristics that are positively correlated to freeriding behavior are high task interdependence, low task visibility and identifiability and, low task routineness. Moreover, the task structure, that is whether the final output is dependent on the whole group or only on certain members, also greatly shapes the effort of individual team members.

Task interdependence also impacts social loafing. First and foremost, with increasing task interdependence, measuring the individual contributions of the individuals becomes more problematic (Jones, 1984). As Liden et al. (2004) demonstrated, when task interdependence is high, the individuals might be more triggered to loaf. The reason behind this is, again, the fact that they feel like their contribution matters less, as it becomes more indistinguishable among the efforts of other team members. On the contrary, when task interdependence is low, individuals have the tendency to be more compliant and put more effort, as their contribution to the task can be told apart from what the other contributed.

Task visibility refers to the degree to which a supervisor is aware of the contributions of the individual team members (Kidwell & Bennett, 1993; Jones, 1984). In their study, Liden et al. (2004) conclude that task visibility is negatively related to social loafing; that is, the more a task is visible, the lower the propensity to freeride. When a task is not visible or identifiable, the individuals carry less the feeling of being just a part of the crowd (Swain, 1996). The degree to which individuals believe that their superiors can effectively monitor their contribution can significantly modify their behavior and motivation to exert effort (O’Leary et al., 2017). Nonetheless, Swain (1996), although he concludes that when tasks are completely identifiable social loafing sizes to exist, he proposes

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that identifiability alone might not completely account for the loafing behavior. He proposes that certain personality traits can modify the freeriding behavior to a greater degree, even when the visibility of tasks is high. This will be discussed further in the upcoming sub-sections.

Task routineness is the degree to which a certain task is structured and repeated in the future. Jones (1984) shows that for highly unstructured and non-routinized tasks, individuals are more prone to exercising freeriding behavior. This again is connected to the degree to which the contribution can be observed and measured. For highly routinized tasks, it is easier to deduce the effort or monitor the effort of each employee, as the processes are well known for the company. However, when the tasks are non-routine, such as for example brainstorming activities or creative tasks, it gets harder and more ambiguous for the supervisors to distinguish whether each team member is operating at their full capacity or whether they are withholding effort.

The type of task itself can increase or decrease the propensity to freeride. Steiner (1972) categorized tasks into three types, and each affects productivity differently. For additive tasks, the performance of the group is determined by the individual contributions of each team member. For disjunctive tasks, the most capable team member determines the performance. And lastly, for conjunctive tasks, the worst team member determines the performance. This categorization also helps in understanding the freeriding behavior. The particular nature of the task changes the incentive system for team members (Albanese & Van Fleet, 1985), therefore modify their willingness to exert effort. For example, Kerr & Bruun (1983) concluded that for disjunctive and conjunctive tasks, the members tend to decrease their motivation, and therefore engaging in social loafing behavior.

2.3.3. Team composition

Team composition refers to member diversity and the balance of personalities (Senior & Swailes, 2004). Given this description, teams can be homogeneous, consisting of very similar members, or heterogeneous, consisting of a mix of diverse backgrounds, skills, and personalities. Homogeneous teams are more successful in carrying out simple tasks, where less creativity is required, and processes of operation are already established (Higgs et al., 2005). On the other hand, diversity is advantageous because it increases the chances of the members finding the best possible solution to the problem, as they usually can generate more ideas (Maznevski, 1994). Hackman & Wageman (2004) state that: “Well-composed teams are as small as possible given the work to be accomplished, include members with ample task and interpersonal skills, and consist of a good mix of members – people who are neither so similar to one another that they duplicate one another’s resources nor so different that they are unable to communicate or coordinate well” (Hackman & Wageman, 2004, p. 60).

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Team composition is viewed as the foundation that affects teamwork processes and outcomes; thus, it can have a considerable impact on team performance in organizational settings (Bell, 2007; Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Successful team performance, which is the reaching of team-goals, requires team members to have the necessary expertise in order to complete the technical portion of the task, as well as effectively navigating the team processes (Bell, 2007). The way a team is composed affects both these areas. Thus, reaching the optimal team composition is a valuable asset for organizations (Hoogendoorn et al., 2012).

Team composition can be analyzed in two distinct levels, surface-level and deep-level. The surface level is mainly concerned with the different demographic characteristics that the team member exhibit, such as tenure, gender, age, race, or educational level (Bell, 2007). Maznevski (1994) proposes two dimensions of diversity for surface level composition. The first one is role- related diversity, which includes the organizational position as well as specialized knowledge and skills. This type of diversity is often wanted by companies, as it can insinuate that team members have complementary skills, which they can use to maximize team performance and produce the desired outcomes. The second type of diversity is inherent to the person itself, and it includes age, gender, nationality, cultural values, information processing style, and personality. This type of diversity usually can generate conflicts that often remain unsolved, as they are of a more complex nature, and the involved parties find it difficult to understand each other. Deep-level characteristics refer to the psychological characteristics of the team members such as personality, beliefs, values, and attitudes (Bell, 2007). Although the literature is concerned with exploring how team member composition influences team processes and performance, there is very little evidence that connects team composition to freeriding.

2.3.3.1. Surface level factors Surface level factors include the differences in cognitive abilities, gender, ethnicity, age, tenure among team members. These immediately observable factors can have an important impact on team dynamics and team member behavior, as this type of diversity might trigger different stereotypes and influence team members to act according to these stereotypes. In terms of social loafing, the literature suggests that some of these factors might make a team member either more predominantly to loaf or to contribute when working collectively with other peers. For the purpose of this research, only three of these factors will be analyzed: skills, gender, and age.

Heterogeneity in abilities refers to the disparity in the skillset of the team members. Having diverse skillsets in a team has been proven to have a positive impact on performance (Campion, 1993). Heterogeneity in abilities might even promote mutual learning among team members, in which more able members of the team are able to teach the less able workers, thus increasing

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productivity (Hamilton et al., 2003). Especially for complex tasks that require higher levels of creativity, heterogeneous teams outperform homogeneous teams (Higgs et al., 2005).

However, although the overall productivity of the team might increase in heterogeneous groups, there is evidence that freeriding behavior also exists. For example, Kerr & Bruun (1983) demonstrated that the contribution of the team members on heterogeneous teams depends highly also on the type of task as well as team size. For high ability team members, it is more probable to exert more effort in smaller groups when they have to complete a disjunctive task whereas low ability team members work harder in a smaller group on a conjunctive task (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). As obvious, as team size increases, the possibility of withholding effort also goes up for both, less able and more able team members. Doll et al. (2017) also found that in teams where there is a high degree of diversity in terms of skills, the tendency to withhold effort is higher than in teams that are more homogenous in terms of their cognitive skills. They found this effect to be true for both high- and low ability team members.

Nonetheless, Hoogendoorn et al. (2012) found that there is an inversed U-shape pattern to the benefits of heterogeneity in terms of abilities. While low levels of heterogeneity seem to increase performance up to a certain maximum, as the level of dispersity in abilities increases, the performance starts to decline again. Therefore, the degree to which team members are heterogeneous also affects the outcomes.

The next demographic characteristics that seem to have an impact on social loafing tendencies are gender and age. The social loafing literature on gender is more extensive as compared to the studies analyzing how age impacts team members in this regard. However, even the existing studies sometimes demonstrate contradictory results, with some finding that these two factors make a difference while others see no effect at all regarding their behavior in terms of withholding effort.

Diversity in gender can be seen as contributing positively to performance, as the possibility to generate different perspectives and new ideas increases (Maznevski, 1994). Conversely, Ivanova- Stenzel & Kübler (2011) found that team composed of mixed gender performed lower than teams composed of men only. Gender seems to play an important role in creating a more positive teamwork experience (Scott-Ladd & Chan, 2008) and predicting social loafing behavior (Simms & Nichols, 2014; Stark et al., 2007). Existing literature indicates that social loafing occurs more in men than woman (Kugihara, 1999; Tok, 2019; Karau & Williams, 1993; de Pillis et al., 2015; Byun et al., 2020), regardless of the cultural background. Kugihara (1999) noticed in his research with Japanese participants that men decreased effort in teams compared to individual tasks. Yet, Quadri et al. (2012) found in their study of cricket players that gender did not reveal a significant

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difference regarding social loafing behavior. Then again, the authors who did come to the conclusion that gender impacts social loafing give some explanations of why that might be the case. One possible explanation for the gender differences in social loafing was offered by Karau & Williams (1993), where they hint that women are more oriented to group coordination and human relations, which might entice them to put more emphasis on group performance, thus reducing social loafing tendencies. Whereas males display a less positive attitude towards working with others (Espey, 2010), therefore focusing more on their own achievements rather than the group achievement. Moreover, the focus of females on relations can encourage group cohesion, which is also a factor that diminishes social loafing behavior.

Few authors have analyzed the impact of age on social loafing behavior. Tok (2019) observed in his experiment that individuals aged 18-22 had higher tendencies of engaging in social loafing behavior compared to the ones 23 and older. Similarly, Quadri et al. (2012) found that younger cricket players are more prone to engage in social loafing behavior than older ones. However, Byun et al. (2020) did not observe a significant correlation of age with social loafing. Age can also be related to tenure, as older individuals tend to have more work experience than the younger ones. As regarding performance, tenure should have a positive impact on the first years and starts deteriorating in the later career years (Walters et al., 2007). On the subject of social loafing, there is very scarce literature that links tenure to any kind of loafing or freeriding behavior. Byun et al. (2020) observed that tenure is negatively related to social loafing; however, more studies need to be done on the subject in order to obtain a more accurate conclusion.

2.3.3.2. Deep-level factors As commented upon above, deep-level factors include personality, beliefs, values, and attitudes. Many researchers have been focused on explaining how team member personality composition and team member’s values and attitudes towards the self and group might influence team performance. However, not enough attention has been paid to explaining how personality and individual differences influence social loafing behavior (Byun et al., 2020).

Diverse personality traits have a positive, negative or neutral relation to job performance (Tett & Brunett, 2003). Barrick & Mount (1991) summarized these personality traits and categorized them into five dimensions of personality which affect performance on an individual level as well as when working in teams. These dimensions include conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to new experiences and lastly, emotional stability. The framework is also known as the Big 5 Personality and is widely used in the field of psychology or management to explain behaviors. Team personality composition is the combination of different individual team member traits in some form to produce team level outcomes (Prewett et al., 2018). Some of these

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dimensions of the Big 5 have a positive relation to social loafing, while others have a negative correlation. The dimensions that positively influence social loafing are extraversion and neuroticism

While scoring high on extraversion means being sociable, assertive and talkative, scoring low is associated with being more reserved (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Extraversion influences a variety of phenomena concerning interpersonal interactions within a team and, ultimately, shapes team processes (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Ülke & Bilgic (2011) found in their study that extraversion is closely related to social loafing. That is, extraverted individuals are more vulnerable towards the phenomenon and more likely to withhold effort compared to individuals who score low on extraversion. However, as Barrick & Mount (1991) point out, high levels of extraversion might be beneficial when teamwork is composed of tasks that require interpersonal interaction and relationships. Overall, extraversion is related to both team performance (Bell, 2007) and social loafing (Ülke & Bilgic, 2011; Dal, 2019). Extraversion is a valid predictor for performance in jobs like management and sales, where interactions with others are crucial (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Dal (2019) showed that people who score high on extraversion might modify their performance based on task identifiability, increasing their performance in a team when identifiability is high while having a tendency to loaf when identifiability of their contribution is low.

Neuroticism is another dimension that is closely related to social loafing. Also called emotional stability, neuroticism focuses on the traits such as depression, anger issues, insecurity, anxiety, embarrassment and emotional instability (Ülke & Bilgic, 2011; Barrick & Mount, 1991; Tok, 2019). Higher levels of neuroticism are associated with lower ability to work in teams (Brown et al., 2004) and higher levels of discomfort in team settings, as individuals higher in neuroticism have difficulties communicating in teams, asking for help when needed, feel inferior compared to other teammates and have more difficulties understanding the tasks. (Forrester & Tashchian, 2010). Individuals who score high on emotional stability display traits such as being secure, calm, self- confident, and have high self-esteem (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017; Forrester & Tashchian, 2010). There is a significant positive relationship between neuroticism and social loafing (Ülke & Bilgic, 2011; Tok, 2019). Emotionally stable people are expected to be more resilient and more confident while handling difficult situations and challenges (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Moreover, people who score high on emotional stability might contribute positively to team performance as they create a relaxed atmosphere and prompt cooperation (Bell, 2007). Emotional stability seems to be indispensable for the coordination of behavior within teammates, as it ensures the ability to control owns temperamental and impulsive behavior (Forrester & Tashchian, 2010).

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Another personality trait that is not included in the Big 5 framework but might be related to social loafing but lacked attention in the academic community is narcissism (Woodman et al., 2011). A narcissist can be described as individuals who have an „exaggerated sense of self-importance and uniqueness, arrogance, an unreasonable sense of entitlement, exploitative tendencies, empathy deficits, and a need for excessive admiration” (Wallace & Baumeister, 2002, p.819). The performance of narcissists is dependent on the type of outcome that they expect to get. If the task displays a high self-enhancement opportunity, the narcissist is likely to perform better, as they would have a chance to state their superiority and satisfy their high ego (Woodman et al., 2011). On the contrary, the performance of low-narcissistic personality individuals remains fairly unaffected if, ceteris-paribus, the condition of self-enhancement is changed. Indeed, Swain (1996) points out that social loafing is more likely to occur among high-ego individuals than low-ego individuals. According to Woodman et al. (2011), the tendency to social loaf is highest when task identifiability is low. That is, when the narcissist cannot get recognition for the work they do, they withdraw their effort and try to freeride on their teammates. The concern with self enhancement can make the narcissist exert maximal effort when a task displays self-enhancement opportunity (Wallace & Baumeister, 2002).

The next factors belonging to the deep level team composition are beliefs, attitudes, and values. Under attitudes and values, one can regard the preference for teamwork and collectivism vs. individualism as composing factors (Bell, 2007). Preference for teamwork and collectivism are shown to have a positive relationship with team performance (Bell, 2007); thus, one would expect a decreased tendency to loaf in these conditions.

Preference for group work indicates that individuals would generally rather be working in a group than alone. Preference for group work was found to have a positive impact on group performance (Jung & Sosik, 1999) and is negatively related to social loafing behavior (Stark et al., 2007). Those who have a preference for individual work perform better in solitary settings (Larey & Paulus, 1999) and will be more satisfied and consequently more effective when tasks are highly individualized rather than interdependent (Shaw et al., 2000). Thus, to minimize this effect, individuals who dislike teamwork are best to be given the opportunity to self-select into groups (Bell, 2007).

The relation between social loafing and collectivistic and individualistic cultures was explored by Earley (1989). The dimension of individualism – collectivism represents the preference for independence and self-reliance in individuals (Wagner, 1995). In collectivistic cultures, individuals are more prone to be interdependent and rely on the group; therefore, they display a higher degree of cooperation and engagement with the group (Wagner, 1995). The focus is mainly on the

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common goals of the group, and team achievement is seen as personal achievement also, and collectivists put collective action ahead of personal interest (Earley, 1989).

On the contrary, in individualistic cultures, group members are more self-reliant, show a higher degree of competition within the group, like working alone and show less readability to cooperate (Wagner, 1995). Earley (1989) observed that when managers had individualistic beliefs, they were more vulnerable to social loafing; however, only when the accountability for performance was low. Collectivists, on the other hand, seemed to perform better in a group than when they were working alone, regardless of the level of accountability (Earley, 1989). Individualists are more focused on personal gain rather than the group’s goals; therefore, when they perceive that their contribution is unnoticed, they have diminished incentives to put in effort as they would not face sanctions (Earley, 1989).

2.3.4. Expectations of others behavior

One variable that can moderate the social loafing behavior is the expectation that other team members will exert more effort or less effort. It can be said that regarding “Effort Matching” the literature is composed of contradictory findings. For example, Jackson & Harkins (1985) found in their research that individuals would withhold effort in a group compared to their individual work because they would expect other team members to do the same. On the other hand, Williams & Karau (1991) state a completely different outcome, when individuals expect others to exert less effort, the likelihood of them loafing themselves becomes lower. When there is a lack of trust and cohesiveness in a team, team members might start suspecting that the others will not contribute their best effort (Frash et al., 2004).

Effort matching might happen regardless of whether team members actually engage in social loafing or not. Høigaard et al. (2006) point out that perceived social loafing, that is only when team members think that others are withholding effort, might also lead to effort reduction. Hart et al. (2001) indicate that not only the expectations of effort play a role, but also the expectations of ability. They concluded that team members tend to engage in social loafing when they expect their team members to have high ability levels while engaging in social compensation when they expected their coworkers to have low ability levels. Similarly, the cultural background and group cohesiveness can also impact how group members expect their peers to behave. For example, in collectivistic cultures, group members will anticipate that others will contribute equally to the team’s performance, thus motivating them not to withhold effort (Earley, 1989). Group cohesiveness is also a factor that mediates the expectations of others behavior. Karau & Williams (1997) found that the expectations of other member’s behavior had a dramatic impact on non-cohesive groups and less impact in cohesive groups.

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2.4. Factors that minimize social loafing

Social loafing tendencies within a group can be minimized or completely eradicated if the team fulfills certain conditions or if certain factors are present during the teamwork. The most prominent factors analyzed by the literature are social connections, reward and evaluation systems, team cohesion and team identity, team composition in terms of personality traits, the degree of self- efficacy of the individual team members, and the collective efficacy of the team as a whole, peer- evaluation, feedback and lastly, social comparison. All the mentioned factors impact members positively into increasing their contribution within a team. In the following sections, there will be a detailed review of each one of these factors and the reasons why they influence freeriding in the way they do.

2.4.1. Social connections and friendships

Academics have investigated the impact of social connections on social loafing both in the workplace (Rank & Tuschke, 2010; Kratzer et al. 2005) as well as with university students (Ng & Chua, 2006; De Paola et al., 2019; Mahenthiran & Rouse, 2000). These studies report similar findings in this aspect. De Paola et al. (2019), in their study of undergraduate business students, found that freeriding behavior was less likely to occur when members of a team shared a social connection with each other. Similarly, findings reported by Kratzer et al. (2005), where they studied the effect of social connections in teamwork, show that when team members regard each other as friends, they were less likely to defect and let other group members do all the work. However, the authors made a distinction between the concept of friendship and just being friendly. The freeriding behavior, and other negative effects in the team, would decrease only in the case that team members regarded each other as friends rather than just being friendly to each other. Similarly, Ng & Chua (2006) reviewed the effect of trust on team member contribution in upper management teams. They found that affect-based trust, which signals a friendship-like connection, is more likely to decrease the freeriding behavior. Moreover, individuals who have high affect- based trust in their teammates are more willing to sacrifice their own resources, such as time and effort, to help each other. Thus, cooperation among friends is less vulnerable to freeriding (Rank & Tuschke, 2010; Mahenthiran & Rouse, 2000).

The implications of these studies clearly affirm that letting workers choose freely their team members would enable the creation of teams that might be more capable of mitigating freeriding problems (Bandiera et al., 2013; Swaray 2012). Moreover, the type of relationship among the group members does not only diminish social loafing but also affects performance. Chung et al. (2018) found that team member friendship is positively correlated with increased performance. Equally, Mahenthiran & Rouse (2000) show that in student groups where the team members

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regarded at least one member of the team as friends, they received higher grades compared to the groups where the members were merely acquaintances.

One explanation why partnering up with friends lowers the incentive to freeride might lay in open communication. Strong & Anderson (1990) suggest that open communication makes cooperation easier, and furthermore, it generates a discussion to solve conflicts. Moreover, when individuals self-select into a group, there is a higher degree of self-identification with the group, which in turn leads to group members to act on the overall interest in a group and therefore avoid social loafing (Aggarwal & O’Brien, 2008). Further, initial connections positively impact group cohesion from the beginning.

2.4.2. Rewards

Rewards are acknowledged by companies as mediators for increasing motivation and performance (Cacioppe, 1999). They have been proven to significantly attenuate social loafing behavior (Mefoh & Nwanosike, 2012). There is a negative relationship between the use of reward systems and the tendency to loaf within a team (Ofole, 2020). Rewards can happen at an individual or at a team level (Cacioppe, 1999) or can be a combination of both creating a hybrid reward system (Pearsall et al., 2010) and can be considered external or internal (Shepperd, 1993). When the contribution is left unseen and not rewarded, the tendency to contribute diminishes (Rutte, 2003). Social loafing behavior can be encouraged when group members know that their real effort and contribution cannot be rewarded or punished (Jassawalla et al., 2009). One solution to tackle the low productivity in teams is to increase the value of the outcome that comes from the contribution of team members (Shepperd, 1993).

Individual rewards inside a team imply that each team member will be rewarded based on their own contribution rather than the overall team performance. Individual rewards in a team might lead to less cooperation and less teamwork behavior since team members would focus more on maximizing their own output without regarding the overall team goal (Pearsall et al., 2010). Individual performance-based compensation results in members giving maximum effort in a team, regardless of whether they perceive team cohesion or not (Blazovich, 2013).

Outcome interdependence refers to rewards based on total team performance rather than team members being rewarded individually (Hertel et al., 2004). Team-based rewards mean that the whole team will be rewarded for the performance, and this reward will be equally distributed among all team members (Cacioppe, 1999). This phenomenon is also known as gainsharing in the literature, which represents a group-wide reward system based on pay-per-performance approaches (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2000). In a gainsharing reward system, those who withhold effort

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are entitled to the same rewards or benefits as those team members who exert maximum effort (Kidwell & Bennett, 1993). Team-based rewards are significantly more complex and might even lead to harmful effects on individual team member performance (Cacioppe, 1999). Team-based rewards can be used to direct actions, to provide support, to reinforce positive behavior within a team, and to celebrate achievement (Cacioppe, 1999). Social loafing happens less in small group rewards rather than in big group rewards because in smaller teams’ individual contributions can be more identifiable (De Matteo, 1998). Group reward systems can work as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, since each team member receives the same reward in the team and there is less visible accountability, it might prompt freeriding behavior (Karau & Williams, 1993; Bennett & Naumann, 2005). On the other hand, if there is cohesion inside the team, it might boost motivation to contribute since the members identify themselves with the team (Rutte, 2003). Using hybrid rewards, namely focused on the individual contribution as well as attainment of team goals, is a good strategy to reduce social loafing and enhance performance, as it encourages team members to put effort towards completing their responsibilities (Pearsall et al., 2010). Hybrid rewards in highly interdependent teams can motivate the team members to help and support each other towards attaining their collective goal while being aware of their own direct effect of their efforts (Pearsall et al., 2010). Bryant et al. (2009) found that a mixed reward system significantly decreases social loafing behavior, even in virtual teams. Blazovich (2013) also found that the use of a mixed reward system, which is a combination of individual and team-based rewards, yields the highest team performance compared to when using only individual or only team-based rewards.

External rewards are connected to extrinsic motivation and regard tangible benefits such as pay, work conditions, fringe benefits, security, promotion (Ajila & Abiola, 2004) and social benefits such as network approval or status (Shepperd, 1993). External rewards have a significant impact on performance (Ajila & Abiola, 2004). Jones (1984) points out that the existence of internal rewards does not lead to motivation and performance without the presence of external rewards first. The external reward system does not only motivate workers to perform better individually but also when they are part of a team (Shepperd, 1993). Internal rewards are connected to the individual’s capacity for self-reward; that is, internal rewards are present when an individual personally values performing well or when they find the task intrinsically interesting (Shepperd, 1993). Thus, an intrinsically motivated individual would simply enjoy and get internal satisfaction by merely completing a task or attaining a goal (Ajila & Abiola, 2004). Likewise, inside a group, internal incentives might boost performance when group members identify with the team or feel a sense of pride or duty towards the team (Shepperd, 1993), which is the case in cohesive groups where individuals see team success as a personal success (Rutte, 2003).

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2.4.3. Team cohesion and team identity

Group cohesiveness is the degree to which individuals desire and value their membership in a team (Karau & Hart, 1998). According to Beal et al. (2003), group cohesion is composed of three variables, that is, interpersonal attraction, task commitment, and group pride. Most of the literature, however, has been focused on exploring the interpersonal attraction variable, which is why Beal et al. (2003) found the other two variables to be weak predictors of group cohesion. Considering the interpersonal attraction, Acton et al. (2019) found that group personality composition also impacts group cohesion in the early stages of formation as well as overtime.

Cohesive groups are reported to achieve better performance than non-cohesive groups. Beal et al. (2003) explain in their metanalytic review that when efficiency is an important goal of the organization and when the emphasis is put on the performance rather than the outcome, group cohesion would positively impact team performance. One explanation for that might be that group cohesiveness facilitates coordinating activities (Thompson et al., 2015), thus leading to higher performance. However, when there are fewer work exchanges in a group, cohesion does not necessarily impact performance as compared to when the workflow is more intensive (Beal et al., 2003).

A number of studies have shown that group cohesiveness or identification with the team reduces social loafing tendencies (Høigaard et al., 2013; Fielding & Hogg, 2000; Thompson et al., 2015). When group members know each other and hold similar values, they will not face social loafing problems, as would teams composed of members who do not know each other (Rutte, 2003). Members of non-cohesive teams tend to reduce their effort when working collectively compared to when they work coactively, while teams of friends show the same level of effort in both situations (Karau & Williams, 1997). These tendencies might be explained by an increased emphasis on team output rather than on maximizing individual interests when teams are highly cohesive (Karau & Williams, 1997). If members of a team put more weight on their individual performance rather than the overall team goals, then the benefits of group cohesion would fade away (Beal et al., 2003).

2.4.4. Team composition

As mentioned in the sections above, team member personality traits can be a moderator for social loafing and performance in teams (Schippers, 2014). While two dimensions of the Big 5 framework are discussed to negatively impact contribution and are associated with increased social loafing in teams, the rest have an opposing effect. The three dimensions of the Big 5 framework most

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connected to higher performance and reduced freeriding behavior are consciousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience.

Individuals who score high in conscientiousness are likely to be reliable, disciplines, organized, cooperative, helpful, and tolerant (Schippers, 2014), success-oriented, self-motivated, dependent, and responsible (Tok, 2019). Moreover, conscientiousness has been proven to be the strongest predictor of performance among the Big 5 dimensions (Barrick & Mount, 1991), especially when conscientious individuals are presented with goals (Tett & Brunett, 2003). Barrick & Mount (1991) found that individuals scoring high in conscientiousness possess traits that enabled them to accomplish work tasks in all jobs and performed better than those who lacked the traits. Moreover, those individuals have a strong sense of purpose and are more persistent (Bell, 2007), while also maintaining higher levels of motivation (Klehe & Anderson, 2007) and embracing positive change while restricting counterproductive behavior (Patel et al., 2012). All these studies confirm that a high degree of conscientiousness is positively related to individual performance. Nonetheless, this dimension is not only relevant to the individual level, but also teams that are composed of such individuals tend to be more deliberate, organized, and task-focused (English et al., 2004; Patel et al., 2012). However, Douglas et al. (2004) point out that being conscientious might not be enough to improve performance; rather, this should be combined with the proper skills and a high degree of emotional intelligence in order to reap the benefits that come with this trait. Conscientiousness is negatively related to social loafing (Schippers, 2014; Hoon & Tan, 2008) and further Schippers (2014) suggests conscientious individuals might engage in social compensation when other team members fail to deliver their task. Similarly, Tok (2019) indicated that conscientious individuals are not only attentive towards achieving their own goals, but also the goals of the group. This tendency is moderated by their high self-regulating behavior, which pushes them to deliver tasks and fulfill their responsibilities, thus, engaging less in social loafing (Tok, 2019). Taggar & Neubert (2004) demonstrated that even when the level of cognitive abilities is low and contribution not qualitative, conscientious individuals still were seen positively in a team, and the lack of their contribution was attributed to external factors.

Personality traits connected to agreeableness include trusting, cooperative, courteous, forgiving, tolerant, and flexible (Barrick & Mount, 1991) as well as conflict avoidance (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017; Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998). Individuals who are agreeable tend to have better interpersonal relationships, and teams which are composed of such individuals tend to have better interpersonal processes and thus higher performance (Bell, 2007; Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Along these lines, teams composed of agreeable members will have better relationships and better conflict management when dispute and tension occur in a team (Acton et al., 2019). Moreover, because of their high readiness for cooperation and being available when team members need them, these

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individuals might positively influence the perception of team cohesion (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Klehe & Anderson (2007) state that agreeable individuals also display higher levels of motivation, just like conscientious individuals. Schippers (2014) points out that agreeableness is negatively related to social loafing in teams, which is in line with the conclusions of Ülke & Bilgic (2011). However, although Ülke & Bilgic (2011) found a negative relation between agreeableness and social loafing, the effect seemed to be little significant.

Traits that are common to people who are open to experience are imaginative, curious, cultured, intelligent, artistic, original (Barrick & Mount, 1991), think independently, question traditions, and learn from their experience (Tok, 2019). Individuals who score high in openness to experience are generally curious, and thus, more likely to try out new things and pioneer ideas (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Moreover, as they are more adaptable and positive towards changes, they might improve team performance (Bell, 2007). Klehe & Anderson (2007) maintain that those who score high in this dimension also display high levels of motivation. However, literature presents very weak links between openness to experience and performance (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017). Likewise, Ülke & Bilgic (2011) did not find a significant relationship between openness to experience and social loafing. Hence, out of the five dimensions of the framework, openness to experience has no apparent impact neither for good nor for bad in team performance and social loafing.

2.4.5. Self-efficacy and collective efficacy

The concept of self-efficacy was presented by a psychologist named Bandura and is “concerned with judgments of how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations „ (Bandura, 1982, p. 122). So, self-efficacy determines how people will act in contingent situations, moderating the level of effort and performance that they will have (Bandura, 1982). Therefore, this concept is a significant determinant of work motivation (Eden & Kinnar, 1991) and influences individual performance (Earley, 1993). Eden & Kinnar (1991) found that those individuals who had low self-efficacy avoided situations that would test their abilities. In a team aspect, self-efficacy shapes the belief that the individual has the capabilities to produce given levels of performance when cooperation and coordination with other team members are necessary (Haines & Taggar, 2006). In other words, self-efficacy can impact the expected outcomes, and thus, individuals will act according to these expectations regarding their effort and consequences of their actions (Sanna, 1992).

Bandura (1977) indicates that previous experiences have a powerful impact on perceived self- efficacy. If an individual had positive experiences, that is, they were able to successfully complete a task, they will have high self-efficacy. On the contrary, if the individual was not able to accomplish their goals, they might develop low levels of self-efficacy. Moreover, the collectivism orientation

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can also foster high levels of self-efficacy for teamwork (Haines & Taggar, 2006). That is, if an individual has collectivistic values, they are more likely to prefer teamwork and develop high self- efficacy for teamwork, thus, thinking they would be an effective team player and that they can influence and improve team performance (Haines & Taggar, 2006). Efficacy in teams is also called collective efficacy and represents the same concept as self-efficacy but applied to the team as a whole (Mulvey & Klein, 1998). Groups with higher collective efficacy outperform and persist longer than the ones who display lower collective efficacy (George & Feltz, 1995). Further, groups with high collective efficacy are less vulnerable to social loafing than groups with low collective efficacy (Lichacz & Partington, 1996).

2.4.6. Peer-evaluation and feedback

Feedback on group performance can significantly impact the efforts of the participants (Roy et al., 1996). Feedback can improve learning and allows individuals to identify poor performance and thus have the possibility to correct it (Brooks & Ammons, 2003). Group members can receive feedback individually or based on the overall team performance as a team. Hoeksema-van Orden et al. (1998) found that when group members would be provided with individual feedback rather than group feedback, the tendency to loaf would decrease. The availability of individual feedback, however, is only possible if the individual performance of the team members can be measured, which is not always the case in group works. Additionally, team members have the possibility to give themselves feedback by comparing their performance with performance standards or the performance of other team members. However, self-feedback does not appear to have the same effect on social loafing as the feedback received from an evaluator or other group members. Suleiman & Watson (2008) found in their experiment that social loafing increased in the self- feedback condition.

Peer evaluations enable group members to give each other feedback at the end of a project and are used as a method to boost self-awareness and increase awareness about performance standards (Piezon & Donaldson, 2005). Aggarwal & O’Brien (2008) found that peer evaluation had a negative influence on social loafing. They argue that peer evaluation increases the sense of accountability among team members and provides an opportunity for the members who are performing poorly to take corrective action. Moreover, peer evaluations expose the individual input of each team member to the evaluators, ergo increasing the visibility of the effort for each team member (Frash et al., 2004). As mentioned in the sections above, high visibility of the individual input of every team member is negatively related to social loafing.

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2.4.7. Social comparison

Szymanski & Harkins (1987) found that evaluation increases performance and lowers the inclination towards social loafing when members use a social standard to compare their performance. The results of social comparison on performance are somewhat diverse. For example, Chen et al. (2014) did not find a direct relationship between social comparison and an increase in performance. Although they concluded that social comparison feelings would be highest when contribution would be visible, and when other team members were performing better, this did not necessarily translate into owns better performance.

On the contrary, other researchers found that individuals who were exposed to social comparison outperformed the ones who were not (Michinov & Primois, 2005; Munkes & Diehl, 2003; Harkins & Jackson, 1985). Similarly, Shepherd et al. (1995) found in their electronic brainstorming experiment that groups who have a basis for social comparison outperform the groups who do not have that same basis. Karau & Wilhau (2020) argue that social comparison increases motivation and helps team members perform better when they have stronger others to compare to, as this social comparison helps them set clearer goals and also provides a guideline for self-evaluation. Thus, social comparison can be used as a motivation mechanism to increase motivation and reduce social loafing (Robert, 2020). Harkins & Jackson (1985) found that when outputs were more identifiable, and participants believed that these outputs would be compared to their peers, the participants would generate more outputs. On the contrary, this was not the case when the participants believed that their outputs were not comparable. Performance dropped when the participants believed that their outputs could not be held against a standard, such as the performance of other team members for example (Harkins & Jackson, 1985). However, although there is a great body of research that assesses the role of social comparison with performance, there is a lack of studies connecting social comparison to the social loafing phenomenon.

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2.5. Social loafing in international teams

An individual’s behavior is influenced by their own cultural background as well as the cultural values of other team members (Murphy & Domicone, 2010). Therefore, it is assumable that the cultural background of the individual team members might influence their perception of contribution and their motivation to social loaf in a team or not. However, the literature on social loafing in multicultural teams is scarce, and moreover, the existing studies seem to generate different results concerning this topic. It can be assumed that multicultural teams face even more challenges, additionally to the ones in homogenous teams, that motivate freeriding behavior. In a multicultural context, team members might face difficulties understanding the actions of other peers, which might increase the uncertainty as to how they should behave, which would lead them to stay inactive so that they would not be inappropriate (Gibson & Grubb, 2015).

Murphy & Domicone (2010) found in their study of American and Austrian students that culture does have an impact on the intentions to loaf, although the support for this hypothesis was generally weak. These results indicate that certain cultures make an individual team member more prone to display social loafing behavior in comparison to other cultures. Similarly, Earley (1989) analyzed the tendency to withhold effort within the American and Chinese culture and noticed that within team settings, American managers tended to lower their contribution as compared to the Chinese managers, thus, indicating that that social loafing is culturally dependent and that individuals in collectivistic cultures are less susceptible to social loafing than people of individualistic cultures.

However, in contrast with these assumptions, Gabrenya et al. (1983) point out a transcultural generality of social loafing, as they concluded from their experiments on individualistic and collectivistic cultures. They conducted an experiment on Taiwanese students and compared the results with previous similar studies on American students, thus being able to observe the behavior of both cultures under similar conditions. They concluded that social loafing was reported in both cultures, indicating that social loafing does not really depend on the cultural background of the team members. Klehe & Anderson (2007) also agree that social loafing evidence can also be found in eastern cultures; however, to a lesser degree than in western cultures.

To conceptualize culture better, Geert Hofstede proposed a framework with six dimensions, which are: individualism vs. collectivism, power distance, masculinity vs. femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long vs. short term orientation, indulgence vs. restraint. They are defined as follows: Power Distance is “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally” (Hofstede, 2011, p. 9).

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Uncertainty Avoidance “deals with a society's tolerance for ambiguity. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations” (Hofstede, 2011, p. 10). Individualism vs collectivism: “Individualism on the one side versus its opposite, Collectivism, as a societal, not an individual characteristic, is the degree to which people in a society are integrated into groups” (Hofstede, 2011, p. 11). Masculinity vs. femininity “refers to the distribution of values between the genders” (Hofstede, 2011, p. 12). Long term vs. short term orientation: “values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one's 'face'” (Hofstede, 2003, p. 4). Lastly, indulgence vs. restraint “Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that controls gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms” (Hofstede, 2011, p. 15). These dimensions are represented in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Hofstede's cultural dimensions model

(Source: Innovation cultural models: review & next steps proposal - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate)

Out of these cultural dimensions, two are mostly researched in connection to social loafing, explicitly, individualism vs. collectivism and power distance. Earley (1989) studied the effect of collectivism-individualism dimension on social loafing and concluded that individuals who had individualistic beliefs were more prone to engage in social loafing behavior when working in a group. However, Earley (1989) did not conclude that social loafing does not happen at all in collectivistic cultures, only that it was more prevalent in individualistic ones. As mentioned above, there are studies that clash with those conclusions. For example, Gabrenya et al. (1983) and Jassawalla et al. (2009) found that social loafing was present in collectivistic cultures as well.

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The dimension of individualism-collectivism has received more attention than the dimension of power distance in the literature (Clark & Baker, 2011). One study by Klehe & Anderson (2007) found that power distance is indeed an influencing factor in the propensity to loaf. Individuals from eastern cultures display less inclination towards social loafing, and Klehe & Anderson (2007) argue that an explaining factor might be that in those cultures, individuals pay more attention to the external evaluators such as supervisors, and thus their desire to loaf decreases. To my best knowledge, the other dimensions have not been linked to social loafing in any kind of way in the literature.

Social loafing in multicultural teams is also impacted by other factors besides the cultural differences. As discussed above, team size seemed to be the most important indicator of whether team members would try to freeride or not in multicultural teams (Tullar & Taras, 2017). Similarly, they found that gender has an impact also in international settings, indicating that females are less predisposed than men to loaf, no matter their ethnicity or nationality.

An additional factor that increases the possibility of loafing in international teams is the cultural intelligence of team members (Tullar & Taras, 2017). Cultural intelligence (CQ) denotes an individual’s capacity to modify their behavior according to new cultural environments (Earley & Gardner, 2015). A culturally intelligent individual would be able to adapt to new cultural settings as well as better understand the behaviors of other culturally diverse team members. Another factor influencing social loafing that is present in cross-cultural teams but not monocultural teams is the proficiency of the language in which a project is being conducted, which in many multicultural settings is the English language (Tullar & Taras, 2017). Jassawalla et al. (2009) also confirm that language skills might be an additional factor motivating social loafing in international teams. For example, they found in their study that Chinese students would be more prone to loafing and freeriding because they would assume that native speakers were more capable than them to complete the tasks. Furthermore, ethnic diversity in teams might lead to members feeling “singled- out” and leads to lower group commitment and a decrease in group presence and performance (Price & Harrison, 2006), thus creating an incoherent team. All these factors influencing international teams are less present or do not exist at all in homogenous teams.

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2.6. Summary social loafing and framework

Due to the prominence of teams for the corporate world today, social loafing has received significant attention from different streams of literature, including social psychology, educational studies, and management literature. Social loafing is the tendency to decrease owns performance when working in group settings (Latané et al., 1979). Similar concepts mentioned in the literature are freeriding and shirking, which indicate that a team member who is loafing receives the benefits for the work of others. The opposite of social loafing is social compensation, which happens when the rest of the team members increase their outputs to compensate for the ones who are withholding their effort (Williams & Karau, 1991). The presence of social loafing in a team can also lead other team members to feel indignated and respond to it by withholding effort as well, and this occurrence is called the sucker effect (Dawes, 1980). Social loafing also impacts performance, depending on how the other team members react. If the social compensation effect takes place, the decrease of performance might be prevented (McKinlay et al., 1999), whereas if the sucker effect takes place, the performance would automatically decline since all the team members would be putting less effort (Schnake, 1991).

The two chapters above discuss the aspects that impact social loafing positively and negatively. These factors served as a basis for developing a framework to better understand social loafing and are presented in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Framework social loafing

(Source: own)

The left-hand side of the framework summarizes the factors that are positively related to social loafing and increase the likelihood of team members deflecting if these factors are present. The

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increase in team size leads to an increase in the possibility that some team members will decrease their effort. The more interdependent a task is, and the less visible the individual output of each team member is, the higher are the chances of encountering social loafing behavior. Team composition is also a crucial factor that can foster or hinder social loafing. Teams who are composed of members who have different levels of abilities and cognitive skills are more vulnerable to social loafing. Likewise, considering team personality composition, the presence of the personality dimensions extraversion and neuroticism also increases the possibility of encountering freeriding behavior in a team. Lastly, the expectations of other’s behavior can also be considered as a factor that impacts social loafing; nonetheless, there are contradictory findings. While Jackson & Harkins (1985) conclude that expecting others to loaf leads to team members loafing themselves, Williams & Karau (1991) find that the same expectations lead to social compensation.

On the right-hand side are listed the factors that decrease social loafing in teams and motivate team members to contribute more. When team members perceive each other as friends, the likelihood that they will withhold their effort is lower due to better communication. A coherent team also influences effort positively, making team members decrease their desire to loaf. Being rewarded for one’s work is well known to be a source of motivation, and this factor also decreases the inclination to withhold effort in teams. As previously mentioned, team composition has a noteworthy impact on social loafing. Teams composed of younger people are less likely to experience social loafing; likewise, being a female decreases the chances of withholding effort. In terms of personality composition, conscientiousness and agreeableness are seen to have a negative impact on social loafing, whereas openness to experience seems to have little to no impact on freeriding behavior. Other factors that decrease the propensity to loaf are peer-review and feedback, as they make the individual input of each team member more visible and provide the opportunity for correcting action. Having a comparison standard with other team members or other teams also seems to increase the contribution, as team members are provided directly with clearer standards and can better manage their goal setting experience. Lastly, social loafing tendency is also shaped by self-efficacy. If team members have the belief that they have the capability to successfully execute a task, they are more likely to do so without holding effort.

International teams face even more challenges concerning social loafing. In addition to the factors that influence monocultural teams, cross cultural teams are confronted with issues connected to the cultural intelligence of the team members, as well as skillsets in terms of language proficiency. Moreover, different cultural dimensions are thought to modify behavior in terms of contribution. For example, there are studies that state that social loafing behavior might be culturally dependent (Earley (1989; Murphy & Domicone, 2010), which would mean that the cultural background of a

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team member can make them more likely or less likely to loaf. However, other studies (Gabrenya et al., 1983; Klehe & Anderson, 2007) state that social loafing happens across cultures.

The last component of the framework is the performance. Social loafing can have a major impact on performance, depending on how the rest of the team members react when they are confronted with team members who withhold effort. For example, in the case of social compensation, the performance might not decrease substantially, whereas if the sucker effect occurs the performance gets automatically negatively affected.

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3. Methodology

“The abilities to calculate and theorize are insufficient qualifications for producing knowledge about an organism whose truth resides both in the superficial details of everyday life and in the hidden recesses of oppressed souls” (Poovey, 1995, p.85). As mentioned in the research gap, there is a lack of qualitative methods that provide an in-depth view of how team members perceive and experience freeriding while working with multicultural colleagues. Qualitative research is typically suited for topics that are under researched and characterized by a lack of literature. This type of research aids in finding new concepts or developing new theories that might not have been explored to a large extent yet. The fundamental reason for choosing qualitative research for the topic of this thesis, is the nature and complexity of the research question. As mentioned in the sections above, existing literature investigates each one of these topics on their own, however, there is no integrative framework to explain how they are interlinked and how they influence one another, and subsequently how they impact social loafing. The following sections contain an elaborated description of the research method used in this thesis. Further, it is explained how the data is chosen and collected and how the analysis is conducted.

3.1. Research method

There are several research methods to address different types of research questions, such as, for example, experimental design, case study, qualitative or quantitative research (Neuman, 2014). Qualitative research is often connected to the researcher itself, as it has an interpretivist philosophy (Saunders et al., 2009). In contrast to quantitative research, where the researcher makes sense of numbers and fixed values, the qualitative researcher includes its own interpretation and understanding of the data. The underlying reason for that is because the nature of qualitative data is more flexible. Qualitative data can be distinguished from quantitative data by their richness and fullness (Saunders et al., 2009), which permits the researcher to immerse itself completely in the data and draw conclusions on existing theories while generating new insights (Neuman, 2014).

However, due to the unstructured and flexible data gathered, qualitative research can also have drawbacks. Due to the nature of the data, a criticism of qualitative research has been that it is not explicit and systematic (Neuman, 2014). Moreover, since the analysis of the qualitative data is based on the interpretations of the researcher itself, it can raise questions regarding the objectivity of the analysis. To address this issue, the researcher should be cautious about fulfilling the quality criteria of this type of research. According to Bell et al. (2018), there are two pillars of qualitative research that assess its quality. First is trustworthiness, which is concerned with the data gathering in itself and includes data credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability (Bell et al.,

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2018). The second is authenticity, which refers to the fair representation of the gathered data (Bell et al., 2018). These quality criteria should enable the researcher to avoid personal biases and gather and present data in an objective manner.

Although qualitative research offers a range of other possibilities, such as using focus groups, conducting experiments and observations, or a combination of these methods, interviewing provides a more in-depth insight into the way participants felt when certain behaviors, such as freeriding, happened during their work in multicultural teams. Semi-structured interviews were used to allow for more flexibility during the interviews. An interview guide was prepared in such a way that incorporates questions for all the research questions of this thesis. However, it was taken into account the possibility to deviate from it, if participants would refuse to answer certain questions or if they would provide other information that would be valuable input for answering the research question.

The interview guide was sent to the participants in advance, as required by the majority of them. It is arguable that sending the interview guide beforehand might alter the responses and make participants less spontaneous in their answers. However, because it is assumed that interviewees had a lot of experiences working in multicultural teams, sending the interview guide beforehand would help them recall these experiences better, consequently, enrichening the provided answers. The complete interview guide can be found in Appendix 1.

Because all the participants took part in English taught study programs, and also used the English language for communication while working in international teams, it is assumed that their language skills would not pose a barrier for conducting these interviews. Thus, all interviews were conducted in English. Conducting the interviews face to face is favorable for the researcher, because it enables them to listen and also observe the behaviors of the participants. Non-verbal communication such as facial expressions and gestures, often provide essential cues for understanding the participants better. However, doing this was not possible with all the interviewees due to various reasons. Thus, some interviews were conducted using online communication tools. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed.

3.2. Interview sample and data collection

It was made sure that the sample of interviewees fulfills certain criteria and allows a decent level of differentiation among them while still having similarities to facilitate comparisons. Taking into consideration the research question, it was required that the interviewees have some kind of international experience and have previously worked multiple times in international teams. By

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having international experience, it is assumed that a considerable amount of time spent in foreign cultures has created a deeper understanding and increased sensitivity towards cultural differences.

Students from three international business programs in two Austrian universities were selected for the interviews. First, participants were selected from the cohorts of Joint Master’s Program Global Business – Kanada/Taiwan (ACT) and Joint Master’s Program Global Business – Russland/Italien (TROIKA) at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU). The third set of interviewees followed the Master’s in international management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, which is in conjunction with the Global Alliance in Management Education, referred to as CEMS.

The ACT Program consists of three international semesters in three different countries, namely Canada, Taiwan and Austria. The cohort is composed of an equal number of students from each country, respectively 10. Students are required to proactively take part in various individual and team tasks. Teams are selected such that each one of them contains members from different universities and nationalities.

The same principle applies to the TROIKA Program, with the only difference being the countries and universities that partake in it. Students from this program spend one three-month semester in Russia, one in Italy and one in Austria. Same wise, they complete individual and team tasks, and the teams are also composed of multicultural members.

The last program, CEMS International Management, is structured somewhat differently. After completing the national year, like in the other programs, the participants of CEMS have the possibility to choose individually where they would like to complete their semesters abroad. The students have the possibility to choose among several partner universities located all around the world. Naturally, working across diverse teams composed of multinational participants is a must during this program as well.

Lastly, the majority of the interviewees were principally selected and approached through personal connections. Likewise, the snowballing effect was used to access other interviewees who fulfill the required characteristics for this study. The table below shows the relevant demographic data of the selected sample.

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Interviewee Gender & Age Background Program 1 M-37 Canada ACT 2 F-26 Russia ACT 3 F-25 Austria ACT 4 M-27 Italy/Germany TROIKA 5 F-24 Austria/Germany TROIKA 6 M-26 Austria TROIKA 7 M-25 Egypt CEMS 8 M-27 Germany CEMS 9 F-26 Albania CEMS

Table 1: Interviewee overview

(Source: own)

3.3. Conducting the analysis

For analyzing the gathered data for the research question of this thesis, the author will use a thematic analysis. Thematic analysis is considered a generic approach for the exploration of qualitative data, as the primary purpose of this approach is to seek for themes or patterns that might emerge in the data sets (Saunders et al., 2009). The researcher organizes the data in conceptual categories and uses data coding as a means to help gather and analyze different themes or concepts (Neuman, 2014). Concretely, the following steps were taken: After the data was collected, a transcription software in combination with the manual work of the author was used to transcribe all the conducted interviews. As recommended in qualitative research, the interviews were transcribed immediately after completing them, which allows the researcher to detect potential improvement opportunities for the upcoming interviews. For conducting the analysis, a text analytics software tool was used, MAXQDA. Typically, this software facilitates the conjunction and comparison of all the available interviews by importing all of the transcribed material into it. Before starting the analysis, the author has the possibility to pre-define codes based on the research interests and the existing literature, which permits the whole analysis process to be more structured. During the analysis, additional codes can emerge that give new insights into the researched topic. This allows the researcher to use a mix of inductive and deductive analysis approach. In MAXQDA it is possible to assign multiple codes to the same segments of the interview, which allows for the analysis to make multiple dimensions and categories of the research question to be less complicated. Moreover, it makes comparison among different interviewee responses and different codes easier. As the analysis progresses and the researcher notices new notions coming up in the interviews, the author assigns new codes, thus having the possibility to observe if new patterns are emerging. All these possibilities are used during the research of this thesis, and the results are displayed in the upcoming chapter.

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4. Results and analysis

Initially, the codes were structured according to the findings of the literature, grouping all categories in the respective three sub-questions, namely cultural influence, motivational factors, and demotivational factors. In Figure 3 are listed all the individual codes. The code “Additional factors influencing freeriding” contains all the extra concepts that emerged during the interviews that were previously not discussed in the literature. These factors are afterward appointed to the category where they fit most, or a new category was created if a pattern was observed during the analysis.

Figure 3: List of all coded segments

(Source: own)

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As a first step into the analysis, after assigning the codes and determining the categories, a word cloud was analyzed to previously observe whether any specific code was predominantly used during the interviews. The word cloud shown in Figure 4 below clearly demonstrates the most used words by the interviewees. From an initial perspective, the codes which seem to have been used the most during the interviews are connected to personality, experience, contribution, grades, international, indicating that these codes might be of higher significance during the analysis.

Figure 4: Word cloud

(Source: own)

In the upcoming sections, there will be a thorough analysis of all these codes grouped in the three sub-questions of the thesis. The first sub-question is concerned with analyzing the factors that positively correlate with social loafing. During the analysis of these codes it will be paid special attention to the notion of culture, in order to differentiate whether there are noticeable differences among the literature on monocultural teams and the experiences of the participants of this research, which were all part of multicultural teams. The second part will be concerned with further reviewing the factors that diminish social loafing, again paying attention to the cultural component and its impact on these factors. The third part of the analysis will directly assess whether the cultural differences lead to social loafing or whether cultural background might make certain team members more predisposed to loaf during teamwork. Lastly, the analysis part will try to conclude whether the presence of social loafing in international teams impacts performance, by examining the codes: “social compensation” and “sucker effect”.

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4.1. Sub-question 1: What leads to social loafing in multicultural teams?

The first sub-question is concerned with analyzing the factors that increase the propensity to social loaf in international teams. For this sub-question, the codes were derived from the literature and are presented in the Table 2 below. The main factors positively influencing social loafing in teams are team composition at the surface level as well as at the deep level, team size, team characteristics and the expectations of other team members behavior. In this chapter there will be a demonstration of the interviewee responses regarding all these factors and categories and a comparison of those responses with the findings derived from the literature.

Sets total 585 Sub-question 1 120 • Team size 13 • Task characteristics 17 • Team composition 10 • Skills heterogeneity 55 • Neuroticism 2 • Extraversion 9 • Expectations of others 14 Sub-question 2 216 Sub-question 3 45 Additional codes 204 Table 2: Code system sub-question 1

(Source: own)

4.1.1. Team size

The findings of the literature regarding team size suggest that there is a positive correlation between team size and social loafing, the bigger the team the higher the chances of some members trying to benefit from others. In the current analysis, all the asked participants did agree to the same idea, stating firmly that in bigger teams, there is more social loafing tendencies. Moreover, Interviewee 6 experienced social loafing with the same team member more in a bigger team as compared to a smaller team. Their examples are listed below:

“The bigger the team, the more likely social loafing is going to happen, because the less visible everyone is, and the more anonymous your contribution is, the more likely you are going to minimize the amount of effort.” (I-1)

“I wouldn’t to say it like this, but it's like the term in economics, which is this specific degree of people where it gets less productive. From my personal experience like for people, three to four people is pretty good. Five are still working, but it's getting a little more difficult and social loafing is definitely more likely. And when you go over five, it's getting even more likely that people don't work anymore” (I-8)

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“Well, in my opinion, it's easier to not contribute when you are in a bigger team. Because there are more people who can do the work and you can be just freeriding. Within smaller teams, it's almost impossible because it's a paper for 15 pages, you're three people, yeah, you have to write this fine, fine.” (I-2)

4.1.2. Task characteristics

According to the literature task characteristics have a major influence on the propensity to loaf. Although task characteristics can be described in various ways, the current research focused more on task interdependence and task structure. The interviewees expressed that task interdependence would be a reason to decrease social loafing, in contradiction with the findings of Liden et al. (2004), where they indicate that interdependence of tasks can be a trigger for social loafing behavior. The interviewees in the current research reasoned that the advantage of high task interdependence is having the ability to exert more control over the effort that others put in the task. Moreover, when tasks are highly interdependent, this enables the rest of the team to realize on time whether some team members are social loafing or not, which would make it easier to take corrective action.

“I also I have experienced it that if the tasks are chronologically related, then for sure, the freeriding probably probability will be very low. because, like you have more possibility to put more pressure on the other person, because it's the time pressure and they will feel like even more guilty if they do not submit their task on time, because they will know that this will affect your task too.” (I-9)

“But I would say if, for example, you have to finish with your part that the other one can start I would say that, that leads to less social loafing. But if everybody is working at the same time, and you have a deadline at the end, maybe you won't figure out so soon, if somebody is not working properly, for example, and at the end, you get a big face because, yes, you're wondering, what did the guy do, for example.” (I-6)

“If it was interconnected, we probably, we would have caught the fact that she didn't do anything. Having it all separated, if you just show up and it's done poorly, then what do you do? Yeah, my part wasn't affected. We still have to fix hers. If this was normal work, though, she would have just been fired.” (I-1)

Moreover, the interviewees emphasized the importance of task structure in terms of how the tasks are divided in a teamwork. If tasks are allocated on the basis of the individual interests and skills of the team members, this might serve as a mediator to increase motivation, as well as a means to control the output of other team members.

“So, I think it's very important to actually listen to every member and see how we actually could divide the work in a way that can make everyone more or less comfortable with their own tasks.” (I-7)

“And I think too, yet to separate or allocate tasks based on the motivation of the team members.” (I-3)

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“I understand what you mean here, but in all the papers that we did, it was very clear like this team member is responsible for this… we divided the parts in the first at the first meeting, and then that's it, like you have a clear goal that you need to achieve. Every team member has it.” (I-2)

As is obvious from these responses, task structure also impacts the likelihood of social loafing. The respondents state that if tasks are structured in such a way that task division is clearly stated and everyone is responsible for the desired task parts, the team members would be less likely to withhold effort.

4.1.3. Team composition One of the primary factors influencing team dynamics and consequently social loafing is team composition. Team personality composition is recognized in the literature to impact substantially how well individuals work with each other in teams. The dimensions that negatively impact social loafing regarding team personality composition are neuroticism and extraversion.

In terms of the dimension of neuroticism this research does not yield any results. All the interviewees did not recall having experienced work teams with people who could be highly neurotic. However, one of the interviewees made the following statemen regarding the impact of high neuroticism on social loafing:

“I would say, so neuroticism is definitely correlated to higher levels of social loafing, because well, I mean, I would imagine, a neurotic person would tend to take things more personally, would have a harder time dealing socially within the group and communicating their ideas in a way that would be conducive to a healthy work environment.” (I-1)

However, it was noticeable from the responses that when the personality of a certain member of the team gravitates towards being more aggressive or stubborn, it can negatively influence the other team members and their motivation to contribute. People with personality attributes that create conflict negatively impact motivation in a team, thus leading to decreased contribution. However, the respondents were reluctant to assign these personality traits to the category “neuroticism”. The experiences and opinions that describe the difficulties working with difficult team members are expressed in the following statements:

“The team leader could be very possessive, and he wants things to be done as he wants, or, like he, he wants to do his will in everything. And then you feel kind of you feel that kind of disregard towards your opinions, and then you prefer to stay silent and maybe not to contribute as much as required or as expected. […] So, as I said before, if someone is very dominant, they take motivation from you, or your trust or your confidence, then it can happen.” (I-9)

“Yeah, I had this as well in Singapore, there was a group member was really… how to say, stressing the others out, wanted to do everything the day after, like

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getting the guidelines way before the deadline. And some members might not be comfortable with that, because I have other things to do. So, I think this can be a huge factor as well, like maybe, yeah, maybe sometimes some people are a bit disrespectful or not, how to say, socially aware, to know how to behave with the other team members.” (I-7)

“But he was not a team player at all. It was like, I have my opinion. And if you don’t follow my opinion, I don't care. Well, in the end he contributed also. But it was a very, very, very exhausting project, took a lot of energy, which wouldn't be the case if this person wouldn't be in the in the group or would just behave normally. And it was actually an international student. So, it was not a student from Vienna.” (I-8)

The literature states that the dimension of extraversion might influence social loafing depending on the situation of the team and the characteristics of the task. Interviewee 9 and 4 expressed their opinion that extroverted individuals tend to contribute more, as they are more prone to participate in the discussions and also to take the lead.

“This could happen because for example, if they are introverted people, they prefer to stay silent to not contribute as much and if other group members are not asking them or asking for their opinions or their thoughts, they will not say nothing, they will not say anything, and for this reason for freeriding will happen.” (I-9)

“And I think that if you're more of an extrovert then you… for example the extroverts in our group, they always lead like… they were leading the group. So they were like… it's not very easy to, you know, to do social loafing if you kind of leading the group, because even like giving structure is kind of like contributing.” (I-4)

Team composition on the surface level also impacts social loafing. One of the prominent factors to explore in this regard is the team member heterogeneity in terms of skills. If all the team members have the same level of skills in terms of proficiency, the teamwork gets easier and there is an increased probability that all team members will contribute equally to the team project, in terms of effort.

“But, and then I knew everyone was gonna do something, because I think, you know, the, as you also know, the groups were made also ranked by like the grade and I think that maybe those who got like a higher grade, they were like… maybe this is also a nice technique to make groups, because then you have like people who do something and then like, you have very kind of equal groups, or even though it's just a grade, and you never know how the grades, you know, sometimes it's just luck. But I think we were a very good group in terms of a lot knowledge and effort in something.” (I-4)

“I was fortunate enough to be like in a group, we were like, all on the same page, we were really good friends. And, and we all had, so I like kind of similar level of English, so we really communicated well. And we also knew each other's strengths. So it was like the best situation it could have for this project.” (I-5)

Skills heterogeneity might increase the tendency to loaf or contribute less as showed by the responses of the interviewees. Speaking about their own reaction to the perception of their skills,

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interviewees stated that they would tend towards contributing less if they felt that other team members are more capable, or if they felt that they lack expertise in a certain topic. They said:

“But I will have to say, this also something maybe in my bachelor's, there was more of this, you know, like: “Let the others do because I just don't know how to do it”. (I-4)

“And I also think, I think that I took some topics that were… some subject that weren't very, I wasn't very comfortable with, and some things about theatre or music, some new things that I wanted to experience, but I found out that I wasn't so… how to say it, culturally aware of those topics, which made me maybe contribute less, but it wasn't on purpose.” (I-7)

“I had a group member who was way older than me, he had a certain attitude and kind of mature personality. And it kind of impacted my trust into my own work, like my confidence into my own work. I wouldn't say I did social loafing, but I kind of worked. Not purposely, but I was afraid to, like to hand in something, what wouldn't be accepted from the other person who is older than me, kind of, and therefore, I, sometimes I think doing less work than I would.” (I-3)

“I think I had more trust in their language skills. And I think although they wanted to do it, kind of because they knew they were going to do it kind of better than me.” (I-3)

The interviewees also expressed about the lack of contribution of other team members in the cases where there was a disparity in the skillset of the team members. Similarly, they noticed that other team members also lower their contribution or their efforts when they notice that they lack the necessary skills to complete a task.

“Some even tried to help, but I think … in general, maybe also coming from another culture, having maybe another university, another logic I don’t know…” (I-4)

“You know, that the level of all the people is like very different… that you have people that are really good in I don't know… finance and the other that are very good in like languages, the others are, like, shy because they're, like, not really comfortable in the environment. And then, um, so I feel, especially in the Troika program, in the beginning, there was a lot related to people feeling unsure, because they felt they were not good enough in the subject, or that there were like, they didn't have like a background in this subject.” (I-5)

“I remember she got upset. And after that whole conversation where I'm like: “You can't do that”. She asked: “Well, I don't understand. Everyone wants me to do work, why can't I just do the PowerPoints? That's what I like doing anyway.” So, the biggest you can't get a fucking business degree as a PowerPoint Princess, you have to do some of the business work.” (I-1)

In international teams, one of the biggest challenges in terms of skills is the level of proficiency of the English language, in the cases where the teams communicate in English. If the team members are communicating in a second language, and they face difficulties in that language, their

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contribution will automatically diminish. In the current study, the interviewees expressed that the lack of proper language skills increased substantially the propensity to loaf and freeride.

“The other one was, like: “I don't feel very comfortable with speaking English, so I’ll just observe more or be a bit more passive”.” (I-4)

“Or maybe there's also the language barrier, if we're in a foreign country, and you don't … how to say it, master the language yet.” (I-7)

“We had two girls from Taiwan, they didn't speak English that much, but they wanted to contribute, like they really wanted to contribute. But they didn't speak English that well.”(I-2)

“And in the other or on contrary, if you're in a team…. where you are totally not on the same page, not from the same background, don't speak the same language in a similar level. I feel most of the work… Actually, first, then to making one's point understandable to all of the team members, which can be so annoying after a while if you always have like to explain everything, like three times long.” (I-5)

“English is not my native language and we had to work in English and I really recognized for example when it comes to correcting a text or correcting a paper. They did most of the work. Of course, it's clear because they are better English speakers than I am.” (I-3)

“Some people barely spoke English. [… One of the girls in our team, in my first year was from Thailand. And she was a perfectly nice person who barely spoke English, not on a functional conversational level. She didn't understand anything she was reading or doing certainly couldn't do any research or hasn't in the past. Was hard to be able to learn her five minute presentation because she had to do it in a language she didn't speak. And for her, yeah, there was a lot of a lot of loafing in there. For sure, but I wasn't upset about it. Because she was thrown into an impossible situation.” (I-1)

4.1.4. Expectations of others behavior

Expecting that the others will contribute more might lead to group members increase their own motivation and contribution, as reported in the interviews. The interviewees stated that being in a team where they have the perception that all other team members will be engaged and will not withhold effort, will increase their motivation. Moreover, the motivation and contribution also seemed to increase when individuals expected their team members to have high abilities, which is in contradiction with the findings of Hart et al. (2001), where they found that team members tend to engage in social loafing when they expect their peers to have high ability levels. The participants in this research made the following statements regarding expectations:

“So, but to answer the question, yes. If I expect some members not to be more productive than others, so that might motivate me to help the others.” (I-7)

“So if I know that everybody is motivated and everybody's contributing, you feel more way more safe, and you feel more secured, and you operate in a safe

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environment. Which makes you more open, you talk more with people, and you just communicate more, and you normally have a better result.” (I-8)

“I am a very competitive person, and I knew that the others are really good. And this also pushed me completely because I know they had very good grades in their national year. And I knew it also from the first lessons in Russia, that they're really good and this pushed me also.” (I-6)

“No, I'm definitely more motivated, more motivated in a good group. Which is not the same as more engaged, because I'm definitely more engaged in kind of taking the lead maybe in a group that is maybe less good in a way.” (I-5)

“But only if usually, if I feel good in this team, and I expect the other one to a lot or more I'm also a person who does a lot and more and wants to contribute on the same level.” (I-3)

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4.2. Sub-question 2: How to avoid social loafing in multicultural teams?

Following the structure of the literature review, the codes used for this sub-question are listed in Table 3 below. The factors that negatively impact the propensity to loaf are team surface composition as well as team personality composition, peer review, feedback, social comparison, reward systems, team cohesion, social connections and self-efficacy. This question contained an additional code which intends to discover new patterns of behavior or factors that avoid social loafing which are not previously mentioned in the literature. During the analysis the results are compared to the literature, pointing out the similarities and differences among the current research as the literature.

Sets total 585 Sub-question 1 120 Sub-question 2 216 • Social connections 28 • Rewards 34 • Team cohesion 24 • Team composition 10 • Age 8 • Gender 14 • Conscientiousness 14 • Agreeableness 6 • Openness to experience 7 • Peer review and feedback 22 • Social comparison 6 • Self-efficacy 18 • Avoiding free riding 25 Sub-question 3 45 Additional codes 204 Table 3: Code system sub-question 2

(Source: own)

4.2.1. Team composition

Team composition is also a factor that influences motivation, contribution and the can decrease the social loafing behavior. First the team members were asked about the surface level composition to identify the impact of predominantly age, gender and skills. Afterwards, there were questions about the team personality composition. Regarding team personality composition, the interviewees emphasized the importance of this dimension for the teamwork and team dynamics. One of the interviewees expressed that:

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“Like the only difference I have noticed, noticed as the one that I just said, like more about the type of the personality than the type of the culture, the culture did not influence so much I think, it's more about the person itself.” (I-8)

4.2.1.1. Team surface composition The literature suggests that social loafing occurs more in men than woman (Kugihara, 1999; Tok, 2019; Karau & Williams, 1993; de Pillis et al, 2015; Byun et al., 2020). This pattern was also reflected in the current analysis. Although most of the Interviewees reported to having experienced social loafing with both genders, three of them reported to being faced with a freeriding behavior more with men rather than with women.

“For me, it really depended on the personality of the person, their durability, what if they thought they can get away with it or not? I've definitely experienced social loafing with both men and women.” (I-8)

“Yeah, maybe girls, sometimes in group projects, some might be more serious than guys. I think, the way that in group work in schoolwork, I guess, from my own experience, the leader of the team was always a girl, I don't know why.” (I-7)

“I would rather say it was more or in my case… it was… I experienced more with guys, the freeriding, than with girls. Um...I don't know if it is a coincidence, it's just something that I noticed. I felt that guys tend to have a more… umm, I don't know…a cooler attitude when you know, taking any, I don't know…taking a task or challenges, or at least they try to appear as if they have like a cooler attitude. While girls, while I feel at least like of course, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, girls tend to be more socially like… also involved in it or like trying to… like not only see the task but also the group, you know what I mean? They also see the social component of the whole thing.” (I-5)

It was also pointed out that the teamwork dynamics change in groups with mixed gender. The presence of women in a team increases the need for social interaction.

“Like whether it's male or female, I think it's really… really… difference maybe the only difference is just see that social tensions…but not as different. Um… If you have girls in a team and you are too harsh with critics, it's counterproductive definitely.” (I-8)

“I find like men are much more matter of fact, the meat and potatoes, what do we need to do? What needs to get done? What are the dates? How are we going to do it? During the ACT program, I was surrounded with girls, and there was a lot more talking, fleshing things out very slowly, making sure we were on the same page. I don't know. I find in general, having a mixed bag, having different having men and women together ends up creating a better product than if it's all men or all women, just somehow, we maybe balance each other.” (I-1)

The older the team members the higher the likelihood that they will not engage in social loafing. This was reported by the team members concerning their own reactions as they were getting older, as well as by the team members who observed the behavior of older members in their teams. The

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major cause decreasing social loafing with the older age was reported to be the “maturity”. The interviewees that report their own behavior articulate as follows:

“Age, the age, I think it can be a factor if there's a big age gap between the group members, which plays a role like…. the younger we are maybe the less mature the less, we feel the sense of responsibilities in a way.” (I-7)

“And it wasn't a mindset I had when I was younger. If I was interested in the project yeah, if I was not interested in the project, then maybe not, right. But the older you get, the more you realize that if you're not fighting someone else is out there fighting very, very hard to have your job, to get a promotion to have opportunities to learn something to put themselves in an advantage.” (I-1)

“I think maybe age yes. Because of course, always we kind of generalize that too much. But I think the tendency that I see… we had like the oldest one, she was a Russian, and she already, she did already he has done a master before. So of course, maybe also due to age but also due to her character she was also always leading.” (I-4)

4.2.1.2. Team personality composition The literature states that openness to experience is the weakest predictor of social loafing behavior (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2017; Ülke & Bilgic, 2011). However, in international settings it seems that openness to experience might positively impact team members to contribute, and moreover be more accepting of the other cultures and different ways of working. The interviewees mentioned the following statements regarding this dimension:

“If a person is engaged and is… wants to work and is open minded, wants to work and is looking for new challenges. It's very, very… more important than whether you are friends or not friends.” (I-8)

“So, this is something that I noticed and that I actually also discussed with other students. Well, I do think that of course, the more open you are, the easier you contribute. This is not only about the current or a significant contributions but like, the more open you are, the more talkative you are… you just like, you know, talk and sometimes the point comes during a discussion and not when you're like, everyone is doing their own part.” (I-5)

“But for her, she said, just based on her upbringing, cultural upbringing in the education system, she needs to know exactly what to do. She needs to know the exact framing of exactly what is expected for her part. Because if she doesn't have that, if it's more open, free flow free structure, just figure it out, she gets panic attacks.” (I-1)

Conscientious individuals have a tendency to self-regulate their behavior, making them less probable to withhold effort in a team. The literature poses conscientiousness as the strongest predictor of contribution among the five personality dimensions. The interviewees who identified themselves as conscientious individuals expressed that they were contributing their best to the group projects. Moreover, some of the interviewees noticed that the team members who they

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considered as conscientious, were also the ones who were very driven. In the following quotes they show how conscientiousness impacts contribution:

“I think that consciousness is definitely a type of personality or an aspect of the personality that can actually make a person drop social loafing, because if you have something to do, if it's your part, then even if you don't, if not comfortable with it, you might take time to do it in the deadline and try to do your best. Even if the outcome is not the one that the other group members were expecting, at least you try your best to do your job, all the work”. (I-7)

“Okay, for another one, it was the personality because she's a responsible person. So that's why she gave all her best.” (I-2)

“Maybe that's just my personality. I've always been the type that if I'm given a job to do, I will do my absolute best to get it done.” (I-1)

The next personality dimension is agreeableness, which is perceived to reduce social loafing based on the premise that agreeable people are more prone to avoiding conflict and try to maintain good interpersonal relationships within a group, therefore, have a lower tendency to loaf. The current research, however, shows that agreeableness might influence social loafing negatively as well as positively. On the one hand, some of the participants stated that agreeableness is a crucial trait which helps to avoid trouble and promotes compromise. They say:

“Agreeableness I think is very important as well for the success of, of the group, because you actually try to avoid conflict, you can you can help other members who you see have some trouble or some difficulties doing their part. I think this is a very important factor rather than being rather than, say, trying to punish them, or to take them up for what they did, or what did not.” (I-7)

“But then when you are open to compromises or like agreeableness, which is also very important, because, of course, a group is never your own project, or shouldn't be, ideally, your own project, but you would definitely need some extent of agreeableness in order to engage with the others because, of course, there is always discussion in a group or should be at least.” (I-5)

“I know, working with people and managing people who, who tend to be more agreeable, they're more likely to take on the projects that you give them, they're more likely to, if you outline, hey, this was what needs to get done.” (I-1)

On the other hand, agreeableness can also be a factor that diminishes contribution, as two of the interviewees expressed that agreeable people might accept certain tasks or responsibilities in order to avoid conflict but end up not contributing to the team at a high extent.

“They were kind of: “I agree with you, because they do not want to deal with conflict, or maybe they didn't want to be embarrassed.” (I-4)

“It goes if you… think there's a point where people just agree and don't contribute anymore. That's like… I had one team that I did this actually. Because like, this

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team was so messed up. They just said, okay, just tell me what you want to do. I do it. I mean I was still working, but not on the level which I could work.” (I-8)

4.2.2. Peer review and feedback

Peer review reports at the end of the courses of projects in university context enable the evaluators to have a better look at the individual contribution of each team member. Aggarwal & O’Brien (2008) pointed out that peer evaluation diminishes the possibility to freeride as it can increase the sense of accountability among the team members. The reports in the current analysis suggest that peer reviews increase the contribution to be “just enough” so that the freeriding participants would not get a negative evaluation. However, from the current responses the presence of peer review forms does not necessarily translate into quality work, however it does modify the behavior to a certain degree. The participants stated that:

“My experiences. And like the wanting, like we talked before, like the two people who didn't work at all and the one person who worked a little bit, the people suddenly start like one or two weeks before the class was over to work, because they told us very late that there would be a peer review. It's quite interesting to see that like, like, this is kind of a motivation, like a major motivation for them.” (I-8)

“I didn't put much effort. I didn't, I didn't put 150%. And about the evaluation, I don't know whether it's in this dimension or not. But for me, it was also important that I knew that at the end of the term other team members would have to evaluate me. That was important. I knew that it means I cannot freeride.” (I-2)

“I don't think so. Actually, I honestly don't think so. If someone is in turned into the social loafing, he, he or she is going to do it anyway. And if one is self-conscious and cares about others, I don't think that would impact too much.” (I-7)

“And, of course, at the time that the professor noticed that, look, you have to submit the peer rating form at the end of the course. Yeah, those three people came suddenly. And were apologizing “And we're feeling guilty to not participate as much as expected”. And, of course, they said that they will do more to compensate us for everything we had done. But there were just empty words. At the end, their contribution still was very low.” (I-9)

The complexity of the peer review concept increases depending on other factors as well. For example, not all team members reported that they would feel comfortable with giving a negative review if someone was not contributing fully to the team.

“I feel that this is something that helps maybe when you don't know the person but if you know the person, maybe you're even friends with them, it's very hard because I would never write a negative review on anyone that are like, like in a personal life.” (I-5)

“I think feedback should be given directly. And at least, I think, at least if it does not work at all, okay, you can talk to a professor, but at least you should give the team member the chance to improve the situation, I think that's super important. […] And

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the other way, I think it's just, it's just unfair to just directly write to the professor and complain about the situation, I think it was not professional. I don't like it.” (I-3)

Regarding feedback within the team and with individual members, the responses of the participants do not display a clear pattern. While some of them were able to notice a change in the teammates behavior after giving feedback, others reported that this did not necessarily lead to more contribution. While Hoeksema-van Orden et al. (1998) reported that individual feedback decreases the tendency to loaf, the participants in this study did not find that this was always the case.

“So, the fact that she did that the first time and the fact that we sat down and gave her grief, apparently, she learned her lesson and tried harder, which is all you can ask for too.” (I-1)

“Actually, not really because in case we gave feedback we had, I think all two or three days, we had feedback sessions to, to tell the others what is going on, what did I find out and so on. And we had a feedback session, we told him his part is not very good. And I think it was on Friday, he went on holiday just spontaneously for the weekend. And I think the deadline for the exercise was on Monday or on Tuesday. So I think we all were pretty pissed off.” (I-6)

“Um, feedback is very difficult word in this University context. Because you tell people how you like it, or what you like, and… positive feedback is very good. Like it is a positive post again, like positive feedback leads to even better work and negative feedback leads to people doing nothing anymore.” (I-8)

4.2.3. Social comparison

Social comparison influences the own contribution positively as reported from the interviewees. As reported by Harkins & Jackson (1985), comparing the own performance against a standard, as is the performance of the other team members for example, would increase the individual performance. This was noticeable also in the current study; however, the social comparison is done by the individuals themselves rather than outside evaluators. Two of the interviewees reported that they would automatically increase their effort and contribution if they had a group with strong performers. They were expressed as follows:

“I am a very competitive person, and I knew that the others are really good. And this also pushed me completely because I know that a friend of mine, Lucas, and Tanya, they had very good grades in their national year. And I knew it and I knew also from the first lessons in Russia, that they're really good and this pushed me also.”(I-6)

“No, but in this case, it's not about the grade, it's more about, you want to compete with quality work, like, I don't want to be the dummy in the end, I don’t want to be the freerider. This is also about what they expect about me.” (I-5)

“Like, yeah, like in Organization when I thought, Okay, everyone is like doing from the beginning, everyone had, like, everything printed, and everyone had read the

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text, I was like, Okay, this is a group work, which is, you know, like, I have to I can't social loaf, like, I don't want that because they were nice.” (I-4)

4.2.4. Rewards

The presence of reward systems decreases the tendency to loaf (Ofole, 2020). These findings were also confirmed in the present research. In the university context, the primary external reward for the students is grade, as the responses of the participants indicated. As the claims of the interviewees show, the emphasis and importance that they put on the external reward dictates the amount of contribution that they intend to give in teams. They confirmed this with the following statements:

“…because some group members might be enticed less to participate in the group because they don't really need a stellar grade, when others need a very good grade, you know.” (I-7)

“I have experienced cases where people are not so interested in the grade, and they prefer to go out or do other things and not come to every meeting we have and contribute less to the team.” (I-9)

“Good grades, of course. Also, I mean, in Austria, we have a quite a good system when you show performance in your studies, because we have performance scholarship, and so on. So, when you receive good grades, you get also some kind of monetary benefit from it. So, it's kind of nice to reach that.” (I-6)

“Sometimes people who were perfectly capable, it was much more important for them to travel, they weren't here to get 100%. They just wanted their degree and to travel around and they're not looking to do. They weren't looking for that perfect grade point average because the plan wasn't to continue along necessarily. So, I don't know, different priorities.” (I-1)

The emphasis on the external reward does not only motivate members to initially start the teamwork with the intention of contributing to the fullest, but it also motivates them to pick up the slack when other members decide to freeride. In this context, external reward does not only increase motivation for the own contribution, but also increase the probability that team members will engage in social compensation when necessary. The participants expressed this in the following statements:

“I will always contribute as much as possible because I want that good grade. And even if the others are not going to work, I will do my best because I need that good grade.” (I-9)

“I think, to get a reward for something can motivate. And for me, as I said before, I'm not afraid of bad grades, but I don't want to get bad grades. So therefore, I do this extra work also from the others, in order to get a good grade at the end.” (I-3)

“…this is something that you get maybe angry about a bit, but in the end, you know, that you will probably be even more angry with always getting unsatisfying results, right.” (I-5)

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“The problem is that the others also influence your grades of course, in a group works. So, I think to do less than when I know that they are not contributing is actually wrong, because of course, then your grade will be bad at the end as well. So, actually, in that cases, I did more than maybe was expected in group work.” (I- 6)

Besides the external rewards there are also internal incentives that motivate and increase the propensity to contribute more to a group work. Although internal rewards are individual, and not shared among the group members, they still increase the desire to contribute for the group work. The respondents expressed the influence of internal rewards in the following statements:

“And of course, it was like, kind of another type of motivation, not just the grade, it was because I wanted I wanted to gain more knowledge and expertise before, as, for example, was the case of McKinsey project. Yeah, it was about digitalization, which is very important right now for the business. And yeah, I was very, very interested in knowing more about topic and also more about the working style of McKinsey as well. For this reason, I was very, very motivated for, for that project.” (I-9)

“But well, I wouldn't say its about the grade but more about… So like, you know, you would have like a kind of satisfaction when you achieve something when you finish something or finish a task in a way that you're fine with it, and fine with the way how it was done. So it's a bit also probably a personal thing.” (I-5)

“Of course, and I think this is very nice in the master’s that you often can choose on what you want to work. And this of course, also enhance your intrinsic motivation when you can write or can talk about present topics that you're interested in.” (I-6)

“The Austrian project meant a future job business connection, that's what really mattered for her.” (I-1)

4.2.5. Team cohesion

Team cohesion is also a crucial factor that diminishes the tendency to loaf. In the literature, team cohesion is described as the degree to which individuals value their membership in the team (Karau & Hart, 1998). Beal et al. (2003) point out that interpersonal attraction is the most crucial factor influencing team cohesion, in the present study however, the participants indicated that task commitment also influences their perception of belonging in a team and therefore, their end contribution. In the following statements participants express that they would contribute more if they perceived a certain fit in the team and with the task itself:

“I also felt kind of this responsibility regarding my other group members, because I didn't want to… because even though I went to Paris, like on holiday on the weekend for my birthday, I said, I want to, this is a good deadline, you know, but I want to do my part…” (I-4)

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“So, I think you can have this kind of situations. But in general terms, I think the more cohesive is the team in every aspect, the better for the team and the outcome of the team.” (I-7)

“But only if usually, if I feel good in this team, and I expect the other one to a lot or more I'm also a person who does a lot and more and wants to contribute on the same level. It's only if I'm not feeling good or valued or respected. Or if something does not, you know, what I mean, if something is not right, within the team, and the other one is doing more based on a certain reason, and I'm doing less on based on the other reason. Yeah, then I expect social loafing.” (I-3)

If they feel like they're part of the team. And this is a team of people they really care about. Maybe they won't, they won't slack. Because then on a on an interpersonal level, you're letting people down. (I-1)

4.2.6. Social connections

The current qualitative research supports the findings of the literature (ex: De Paola et al., 2019, Kratzer et al., 2005) stating that social connections decrease the likelihood of social loafing behavior. All the interviewed participants seemed to have had good experiences when working with friends rather than unknown people. The reasons mentioned for that are connected to open and direct communication, as is also suggested by Strong & Anderson (1990). Moreover, it was pointed out that the existence of a friendship might enhance the psychological ownership for the group, thus increasing the desire to participate and not let the other group members down.

“That is something I learned much more in Taiwan, the closer the team is, not just on the surface, but the closer your actual connections with people, the more psychological ownership you feel for your team and the projects, the more likely you are to, to engage in that.” (I-1)

“It would be unfair to your friends and you don't want to be dishonest with your friends.” (I-2)

“The communication, of course, to friends, you're more open. And if they don't communicate how they feel, and why they are maybe not performing that well, of course, you would address them much, much earlier. Maybe it would be harder to find words, for a team member who is not my friend, to say: “This is not appropriate, not appropriate at all!” for example, I'm not quite sure about that. Maybe yes.” (I-6)

“In the end, I mean, we tried to distribute some work to her but, in the end, that was quite difficult to get her to work. Especially because you don't have this closeness, which you have normally.” (I-8)

“And also, I will also stress the social connections, they're very important as well, because, like, it's very easy to let down strangers that you'll never leave your friends in a large, that's for short, and if you have such good social relationships within team, then there will be no room for freeriding.” (I-9)

However, some of the interviewees also reported that the fact that friendships exist within teams, it might make the team members tolerate more social loafing behavior because of the friendships.

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Moreover, one of the participants pointed out that friendships might reduce the overall efficiency of the team, as friends would engage more in discussing topics which are not related to the work or a certain project.

“I just didn't want, I think it's personal. I didn't want this person to fail. That's it. Like, now I'm thinking about my experience in Taiwan working in a team with the member from China. We all, all the members, including me, we knew that he didn't put enough effort. But just, we didn't want this person to fail the program because we didn't want him to repeat the year. And we had good relationship with this person. So that's why we didn't do anything in the end.” (I-2)

“Because actually, if maybe I don't feel so good, or I can communicate that better to my friends, and maybe they accept more of social loafing, maybe then or freeriding as for people they barely know. I don't know. Maybe in that way, I would say that if you don't know that people, maybe you're less understanding for them.” (I-6)

“I think it does in a bad way. If you're really close to, to the other team members, in my own experience, because we're not you're not supposed to be working with your friends. That's my own opinion. Because if you have this barrier between the members, it's, you know, we're there to do the work and not.. because sometimes you're doing some meetings to get ahead with the work and at the end of the day, you find yourself not doing what you were supposed to do and going off topic and maybe making jokes or I don’t know.” (I-7)

4.2.7. Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy also is also reported to have a great impact on the contribution. As pointed out by Earley (1993), self-efficacy is a determinant for work motivation. This is also in line with the reported quotes during this analysis. Although most of the interviewees expressed this dimension as being the “Self-confidence”, namely the belief that the own contribution would be perceived as good quality. The participants gave insights about their own behavior when they perceive low self- efficacy. For example, Interviewee 3 and 4 stated that the fear of their contribution being not good enough would result in them delaying the contribution or reducing the amount of contribution:

“I had a group member who was way older than me, he had a certain attitude and kind of mature personality. And it kind of impacted my trust into my own work, like my confidence into my own work. I wouldn't say I did social loafing, but I kind of. Not purposely, but I was afraid to, like to hand in something, what wouldn't be accepted from the other person who is older than me, kind of, and therefore, I, sometimes I think doing less work than I would.” (I-3)

“But if I kind of doubt it and I'm like, Okay, this is something I don't know how to do it so maybe let's do it in two hours or tomorrow I would rather procrastinate if I'm not sure but if I have a plan in my head, my head and I'm like okay, I'm gonna do this this and that.” (I-4)

Interviewee 1, 5 and 6 noted that other team members did not contribute at all, or contributed very little because of their belief that they would not be capable of doing the work. However, this lack

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of contribution was attributed more to their cultural expectations about contribution, rather than their skillset.

“I would say, or I already stated in the introduction part that you always have to differ between social loafing and maybe yes, that you come from a different culture, you come, you have a different educational background, and so on, I wouldn't see all of that social loafing or freeriding, maybe, you've just feel, you don't have enough self-confidence, for example, to proactively participate, and so on.” (I-6)

“Let's go with the example of Judy. Okay. However, one divided everything up, right. Okay, great. So, we left her the smallest part to do and we cultural differences on face saving and on perceived self-efficacy, I think would be part of it. Right? Her own ability level, or at least what she thinks she can do. She thought that she doesn't have experience and she's not as capable. So, whatever she produces won't be as good quality. In her words, when we talked about it afterwards, so she just decided not to do it.” (I-1)

“So, but of course, you also felt that she was very unsure of herself or how to contribute. So, what we did in this case was really like talk to her, like check, kind of encouraging her. So, it was not a freeriding on purpose, but more like, because of shyness or less self confidence in this case.” (I-5)

4.2.8. Additional factors avoiding social loafing

Two additional concepts emerged during this discussion that are not previously analyzed in the literature review above. One of them is communication and the other one is the perception of fairness. Interviewees expressed that communication is crucial to setting the right expectations for the contribution of each member, as well for understanding the underlying reasons why some team members might be withholding effort. The interviewees explained that in their attempts to reduce social loafing, communication was the most effective technique. They confirm this in the following statements.

“The best approach is to talk to the person, but first normally you talk with other people on your team and see whether they think the same about it, because normally you can feel it what other people think about other people. But my most common approach, right now, is to try to get a face to face, or at least a talk with only two people. So, it's normally me and the person alone and I'm just asking, like not like: “why are not working”, but “is anything wrong? Can I help you? Like how can I support you? You know what to do?”. I'm not going to bother with why you're not contributing but rather how can I help you to work?” (I-8)

“But maybe just make them understand that communication is like, it's important and that, like, instead of not doing anything, just try to do your best like, like, go get… make them understand that no matter what they do, like doing something is always doing a lot, you know, and not, I don't know.” (I-4)

“I think the best way to go is to actually try and talk to them and see what's going on why is not the work the way we want. I think is a very important factor as well for the success because sometimes it just takes like one or two minutes to communicate about something and then it all goes the right way.” (I-7)

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“I think communication is the biggest, most important thing to avoid social loafing, that everyone is, like is on the same page has clear common goals.” (I-3)

“And the more trust you're going to feel, to express when things are wrong, the more trust you're going to have, that everyone will do their part that you're, you're able to relax and do what you need to do.” (I-1)

“And, also, of course, directly approaching people and saying them, of course, in polite way, because often it also happens that you would talk with the team members about how this person is not contributing, but nobody actually really would say them.” (I-5)

The other concept related to lower levels of social loafing that emerged during this research is fairness. The interviewees described that for them personally, the perception of fairness and the desire to be fair towards the other team members is a motivation to increase their contribution and not engage in freeriding behavior.

“I think also talk about fairness at the beginning is like that everyone know; everyone is equally important. Everyone has to be fair. I think that's a big, big, big point. If everyone knows that everyone is equally important to the accomplishment of the task. I think everyone could be more motivated and social loafing, would occur less, if you make sure that everyone feels that he or she is important within the team. I think that’s how you can avoid social loafing.” (I-3)

I'm frustrated, first of all, and I get emotional, because I think it's just unfair. Even though I know it can happen to everyone based on circumstances, but if the circumstances are clear, and everyone is motivated, everyone is respected, then I could get frustrated if someone is going into this direction, because I think it's just not how groups should behave in general. (I-3)

“No, not at all. Because actually, I really hate it if somebody's not interested in the group. So, you shouldn't do the things you don't want somebody else to do to you, to you. So no, of course not.” (I-6)

“Because you feel a bit bad for them no? Like the it's not the way it's supposed to be like, if there is a group of four people, there shouldn't be only one person doing the whole work that… I think that will be totally unfair to put all the workload on one person. I think in life in general, you should be… always have this empathy toward others, towards others, right? We all have our own obligations. We all have our lives. Our time is limited. So, I think it's just unfair to get someone do all the work. That's just my opinion.” (I-7)

“Like, you can't, you can't do a high school level PowerPoint for somebody else's work and claim it's yours and graduate with a degree. Yeah, they're like, it's just not fair.” (I-1)

“I feel that of course, it is unfair If someone is working more and more than the other person.” (I-5)

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4.3. Sub-question 3: How does cultural diversity influence social loafing?

Sub-question 3 aims to analyze in more detail the influence that culture has on individual team members, team dynamics and also on social loafing. In this sub-question it was paid attention to the code culture and all the associated notions. Previous research has listed a series of factors that are connected to social loafing in multicultural teams, such as language skills, cultural intelligence and the dimension of individualism-collectivism from the Hofstede’s framework. However, these studies demonstrate different results, thus not concluding a unified answer on whether coming from a certain cultural background makes team members more likely to social loaf or not. This research analysis this question by trying to understand the experiences of the interviewees with team members from different cultures. Table 4 demonstrates the code system used for this question.

Sets total 585 Sub-question 1 120 Sub-question 2 216 Sub-question 3 45 • Culture 45 Additional codes 204 Table 4: Code system sub-question 3

(Source: own)

Generally, the interviewees displayed conflictive opinions in regard to the importance of the notion of culture concerning social loafing. While some of them emphasized that cultural difference does make a big impact on team dynamics, team processes and social loafing, others stated that the difference lies rather in the personality of a specific individual, not their background. Nonetheless, it was commonly agreed that cultural diversity in a team makes the working process harder, especially in terms of communication, expectations of delivery, and generally the ambiguity of the expected behaviors. The following quotes summarize these opinions and experiences regarding the challenges in multicultural teams:

“So basically, maybe there are maybe less misunderstandings, which is basically always a thing in… you know, when you have culturally diverse teams or groups or… yeah, meetings or whatever.” (I-4)

“Because when you're talking to the people who have the same culture as you do, it's easier for you to communicate and be transparent about what is required from each person” (I-2)

“And since I'm from Russia, this culture is very direct. And we are very straightforward. So if somebody is not putting any effort, we cannot accept that. A

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student would go to the professor and say, like, okay, this student should be out of our team, because he or she is not putting any effort in our project. But in multicultural team, and especially in our program, it was difficult to do that. Also, we were afraid to hurt another person. And be that direct. So yeah.” (I-2)

“And I can give you the example of one of Chinese teammates, for example. We were already warned by our teacher that in from the Chinese culture, they're not proactively participating. But for them, it is more or less, some kind of a good behavior to be a little bit quieter and only to participate when they are asked and when their opinion is asked from them. And when we had the group discussions, of course, the Austrian students and the Italian students worked and, and participated and so on. And this Chinese person was always sitting next to us and was completely silent.”(I-6)

“I feel most of the work… Actually, first, then to making one's point understandable to all of the team members, which can be so annoying after a while if you always have like to explain everything, like three times long.” (I-5)

“I loved working with her. She worked in a very different way than me. But she was smart, capable. But for her, she said, just based on her upbringing, cultural upbringing in the education system, she needs to know exactly what to do. She needs to know the exact framing of exactly what is expected for her part. Because if she doesn't have that, if it's more open, free flow free structure, just figure it out, she gets panic attacks.” (I-1)

“So if your, and maybe this is also largely cultural, if your boss tells you that they want 100%, is the cultural expectation that you need to deliver that, or is the cultural expectation that they are just saying it.” (I-1)

“For example, I worked in a team with just two people, and there was a Chinese person, and you think a little bit more about what you're saying what you're not saying just to not offend each other. So, it's kind of trying to show each other mutual respect. And then it's normally actually not the major factor, which determines if the team is good or bad.” (I-8)

“And it was actually very interesting to see how people interact with one another, compared to, to other countries, for instance, in France, people usually don't communicate a lot, did an internship in finance over there. […] So, I would say that was very hard for me, because I wasn't used to this kind of way of communication. ” (I-7)

The impact of culture in social loafing has been discussed in the literature and has yielded opposite results as well. As for example the study of Earley (1989) implies that the degree of individualism and collectivism impacts social loafing and stated that social loafing is generally more present in individualistic cultures, as they put less emphasis on group work. However, Gabrenya et al. (1983) conducted an experiment in collectivistic cultures and concluded that social loafing as a phenomenon is indeed present in their group works, assuming that social loafing happens across cultures. Thus, concluding that culture does not have an impact on the tendency to loaf or to contribute more in team works. The current analysis also demonstrates somewhat contradictory statements from the interviewees. While all agree on the fact that the multi facets of culture do

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impose many difficulties for the teamwork, the responses regarding social loafing varied. Especially two of the interviewees made multiple statements that the impact of culture in itself does not lead to individuals loafing or contributing more. They were expressed as follows:

“Well, there are patterns in terms of group constellations, that's true, but I wouldn't necessarily say connected to internationality or where all the other people have coming from. Because from the experience I made is that most, it doesn't matter” (I-8)

“I have worked with people like from different cultures. Yeah, collectivist ones, and individualistic ones, but I couldn't make a comparison, to be honest. I haven't noticed any big difference between them” (I-9)

“But regarding social loafing, um, like, for me, from my own experience to say, there's more social loafing in some cultures, rather than others would be unfair. I think some cultures might entice people, maybe on intention to participate less in group projects in, but I think it's all up to the individual.” (I-7)

On the other hand, the majority of interviewees did believe that culture impacts social loafing, or at least that different cultural backgrounds are connected to different expectations regarding on how much effort one needs to put in a group work. For example, they expressed these opinions in the following statements:

“And the way they've explained it was, the boss would always demand much more than they knew you were going to deliver. Because if they know the staff, they know the cultural expectation is that it's okay to deliver less than what was asked for, which means that if they asked for more, they're going to get even lower than that. So, they always have to ask for the most, okay, so that they can get close to it, if they ask for 100, they'll get 70. So, they ask for 130, to get the hundred.” (I-1)

“I think in individualistic cultures, like we are like Austria, I think it's easier for our culture to actually put others into social loafing. Like because we're so individualistic, kind of, we always usually think our ways, the best. So, if you're from a culture where you're not like, very you're not dominant, do not speak up I think it's easier to get demotivated from an individualistic culture.” (I-3)

“Some even tried to help, but I think … in general, maybe also coming from another culture, having maybe another university, another logic I don’t know…” (I-4)

“But the actual reason for it is maybe not always because he doesn't want to put effort in the work, but maybe he has some problems maybe in his culture, it is more appropriate to be maybe… or to ask… to answer questions only if you are asked, and you are not proactively participating in the group. So, this is actually I think, the biggest challenge to differentiate here.” (I-6)

“I mean birds of a feather flock together anyone who tells you that a culturally mixed bag with several different languages floating through it will be easier than a homogeneity is delusional. Okay, I would say even within our own culture, if I was with older people and younger people, suddenly this is an issue even within our own culture without having to communicate because there's generational cultural differences. If we have different interests, so if there were 12 people who are

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church going Christians and I'm the only atheist in the group potentially that can go some serious conflict, if they're all major hockey fans who are obsessed with hockey and all I like is the ballet, I mean, it might get in the way. I don't know, you know what I mean? So there's what national cultures and familial cultures and then interest cultures, I don't know that I think just the closer you are in all of those different dynamics, the less you have to struggle to understand and get people to understand that, the more you'll be able to figure it out all out.” (I-1)

“Actually, from my point of view, it was exactly the other way around. Like in Canada and in Austria I think I put way more effort into group projects. Because I felt that the way how the professors did it, or communicate with us, was for me the correct way, kind of, I felt a bit more respected than in Taiwan.” (I-3)

“In my experience, I would say that I saw individualistic cultures work more than collectivistic cultures. But I think that it was often default from us from individualistic that we put actually the other ones in this position, kind of, that we forced them to be kind of lazy, because we gave them the impression that our way or our style is better to make a certain task.” (I-3)

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4.4. Additional codes

The section of additional codes includes all the codes that emerged during the analysis which were not yet assigned to a certain category or were not prominent enough to create a category. This section will present the additional concepts that arose during the analysis which could be relevant to social loafing. However, these codes do not constitute clear patterns, therefore, will not be included in the final framework. Nonetheless, they can serve as basis for future explorations. The table below demonstrates the specific codes listed under this category.

Sets total 585 Sub-question 1 120 Sub-question 2 216 Sub-question 3 45 Additional codes 204 • Additional factors influencing freeriding 88 • Feelings 18 • Expectations of team performance 12 • Unconscious freeriding 28 • Reactions to freeriding 4 • Social compensation 34 • Sucker effect 4 • Performance 16 Table 5: Additional codes

(Source: own) 4.4.1. Additional factors influencing socia loafing

During the interviews the participants brought up several other factors that could increase the likelihood of freeriding, not only in international teams, but also in general. These factors could be grouped in three broad categories, namely, awareness, character, and, past experience.

Regarding the awareness category, the interviewees mentioned that social intelligence, social awareness, cultural awareness can have a significant impact on social loafing. The interviewees noticed that if team members appear to demonstrate low awareness in the mentioned areas, they are more likely to withhold their effort in teamwork.

“Well, just generally speaking, what I think I noticed is that people who are higher in social intelligence tend to contribute more, while people who score lower and social intelligence just often care less, but just generally speaking. […] But we figured out that this person like… that you couldn't really change his behavior,

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because he just didn't, he was lacking the social intelligence that you would work as a team to achieve something.” (I-5)

“So, I think this can be a huge factor as well, like maybe, yeah, maybe sometimes some people are a bit disrespectful or not, how to say, socially aware, to know how to behave with the other team members.” (I-7)

“One thing, which maybe was missing, was like how the cultural awareness of each team member, like how each other’s culture affects social loafing. For example, I'm coming from a pretty diverse background, but I tried active to get to know many different cultures and how people think and what is polite or is not polite. I think there are some people who don't care about it.” (I-9)

The other category includes personality characteristics. The prior sections discuss the impact of personality on social loafing based on the Big 5 Personality traits, however, there are additional characteristics that seem to influence social loafing which are not included in the above-mentioned framework. The interviewees state that traits such as shyness, laziness are positively correlated to social loafing, that is, they increase the chance of encountering social loafing when team members display those traits.

“[..] but she was kind of, you know, I don't feel like working […] So, it's just like this being lazy, like social loafing, that sense.” (I-4)

“It can help you get lazy based on circumstances. If someone takes the motivation from you based on with their own behavior, I think it's, it's possible.” (I-3)

“… there is like a barrier maybe less or which to do to… yeah, which could exist if you for example, if you're more shy or if you are shyer and you're like: “I don't know how to say that in English”, so, this could be one thing.” (I-4)

Whereas traits such as being respectful, honest and displaying a high willingness to help others are negatively correlated to social loafing. Team members who displayed these traits also demonstrated high propensities to withhold effort.

“But there we were kind of, you know, together in the same boat, you know, in the same situation, I think we were very honest to one another.” (I-4)

“One is the willingness, like, you know, I don’t know how to explain, but some people want to help…” (I-4)

“You will always try to make this person also learn something from it. And this is why it takes much more effort. But I also feel like more person …I don’t know, you know, you become proud at some point of this person.” (I-5)

“Like, not only to open up like to be self-secure, but also to respect others is like super important.” (I-5)

“And then you feel kind of you feel that kind of disregard towards your opinions.” (I-9)

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“Actually, from my point of view, it was exactly the other way around. Like in Canada and in Austria I think it put way more effort into group projects. Because I felt that the way how the professors did it or communicate with us was for me the correct way, kind of, I felt a bit more respected than in Taiwan.” (I-3)

The last category concerns past experiences. According to the interviewees, if team members figured out in the past that someone was overcompensating, then they would be more likely to loaf. This category can be closely related to the category “expectations of other’s behaviors” which was discussed in the literature review and during the analysis, however, it differs in that team members in this case did know for certain how others would work.

“the other one is, well, I know that the others are doing it [..] But they knew that: “Okay, he did it before, so why should I not do it, like an effort!” (I-4)

“If I see that they treat me like that, like: “Okay, she will write something then we will correct it and we will get a good grade”, I will not give my best.” (I-2)

4.4.2. Social compensation or sucker effect: performance outcomes

Another aspect related to social loafing included in the additional codes is concerned with performance and the reactions of the team members when faced with this phenomenon. As discussed in the literature, two of the reactions towards team members withholding their effort are social compensation and the sucker effect. Social compensation might happen for various reasons. First, it can happen when the team members feel that the others are not going to contribute or have a lack of trust in the skills of the other team members. Second it might happen when the output of the teamwork is especially important for the team members who are compensating, which in the case of this research is connect to the grade that students receive for their groupwork. Team cohesion and feeling part of the group is also a reason why member exceed the amount of work in order to compensate for the members who are freeriding.

“We had a group of five, we were a group of five, but we created another WhatsApp group with three people, because the other two were not contributing.” (I-4)

“But they kind of knew that this is something like… okay I rely on the others and I know that they will do it because they are interested in having good grades and I am just freeriding.” (I-4)

“Because if I see it, I get afraid, especially in a group task, that I get punished for this as well, kind of. So, I am doing more, I'm putting more effort into the situation more effort into the task. So I think if, personally, if I'm afraid that I get punished, also, based on the others work, I do more.” (I-3)

“Some situations you're forced in school, they really forced in an unfair way, the native English speakers to pick up the slack for the non-native English speakers, they built that into it. Everyone got the same grade, but it was a lot more work.” (I- 1)

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Some of the interviewees expressed that they do not see social compensation as a bad thing, especially in the cases where they perceive a lack of skills from the non-contributing team members.

“So, there's those situations where I'm not going to be upset because you're doing your best under the circumstances. And guess I need to pick up the slack. But it's not coming from bad intentions.” (I-1)

“I had one… like the girl from the Philippines. She did her best, I know that she couldn't do better. She did really her best. And that's why that's why I was not very, you know, it was okay.” (I-4)

“If it occurs to me to not engage or like not waste too much energy on the fact that this guy's not contributing, but wasting more energy on, like, how we can compensate with the others are, like, you know, always to try to keep up the positive spirit, which is something that really helped me.” (I-5)

“So even if I had people which were like, or we had people not working at all, or working less, or the work was pretty bad. As long they did any… anything… I think it's okay. Because I'm not going to say anything, because as long as they do what they can. Like, they're just people who don't know how to use excellent people who don't use PowerPoint. And if that's the case, it's okay. I don't mind because I can't expect that they have all the same skill set. It's more about how hard you try.” (I-8)

“This one is fine. So that it's fine to me, as long as they're not working in the opposite direction. So as long as they say that in the end, okay, I don't want to work. I don't care about it, which is okay for me, as long as they don't disturb others.” (I-8)

“But maybe if I expect some persons to contribute much less, then that would make me more motivated to help the other members… for them not to feel alone. How to say, I'm not very keen on the…. how to put it… I don't intrinsically believe that in any group work or project, the works should be divided in an optimal, optimal way. Some people might do less but better than others, you know, it's not only about the workload or about the quantity, or I did more slides, or did this or I did that. So, I think it's should the work should be divided according to everyone's preferences and everyone's knowledge about the topic.” (I-7)

On the contrary, the sucker effect seems to be less common than the social compensation in teams. Only two of the respondents answered that they would potentially consider contributing less if they see that the other team members are social loafing, and only one of them stated that this reaction happened in past group works. The reason for the sucker effect in this case seems to be a lack of interest for the outcome of the group work.

“I remember that when I opened the Word document, everything the others wrote, maybe also mine, but you know, there was still, you know, accents missing everything was so…. And then I was like, Okay, I did my part well, it's a bit pity, but I won't… because it was actually not that important, the course for me, but I won't be the one, because it was also younger, but I didn't want to stay like days and nights, just correcting the mistake of the others.” (I-4)

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“But I think it's also a bad reaction, for example, and from my perspective, if I feel that the other person is social loafing, I shouldn't do automatically more. Because it's not always worth to put that much extra effort into a group project, if you really see that the other ones are not putting the same effort.” (I-3)

The literature predicts two types of direction that in which the performance can go when social loafing is present in a team, depending on whether the remaining team members decide to compensate or if the sucker effect occurs. The responses of these interviews gravitated towards people saying that the overall performance is affected when there are members who freeride in the team, no matter how much the rest tries to compensate. Six out of nine interviewees agreed that social loafing leads to a lower performance, especially when the workload is too much:

“I had a group project with a team where there were, there were a lot there was a lot of freeriding, and the overall performance was quite affected. There were, there were various tasks, but in one of them, the performance was highly affected. But at the very end, the grade was not for all of us… like because the professor took into consideration that okay, the overall performance was not so outstanding because only two people were working, and the others were freeriding. In terms of grade, it was okay but in terms of group performance task performance, it was not okay. It's highly affected.” (I-9)

“The first one is the performance will be lower anyways. Just because, if five people work or two people work, like just from capabilities and from the input, you have the time, you have resources, just difference.” (I-8)

“You don't care so much about grades as long as you are not failing the courses. But, I feel we always managed to kind of compensate. But once it actually happened that we all failed because one was plagiarizing.” (I-5)

“I mean, yeah, yeah, it depends on the quality of the task that's required, though, right? If it's a menial task, then the quality is not impacted. If everyone on the team is a specialist, and we all need each other, then then absolutely, it'll be it'll be impacted. […] So, imagine that we're doing a project that requires Chinese and Chinese translation as part of the work but my… I don't speak Chinese. And the Chinese speaker decides to do less interviews then they were supposed to, or the quality of the translation was lazy, and we didn't really understand, or they didn't ask depths of questions, and there was no way for anyone else to pick up the slack.” (I-1)

“Actually, it was rather the letter that the group, the others, the other parts of the group decided then to work more and to maybe do the things maybe the person didn't do. So, but that is only possible when the work is not too much. Of course, we said for the, for the last task of the case studies, we said we can't work with people anymore, who are doing nothing and can't contribute at all, because the deadlines were pretty tight set. And you really had to work. And yes, but in that cases, we didn't have so much freeriding.” (I-6)

The rest of the interviewees experienced that performance was not highly impacted by the presence of team members who freeride in a group, as the rest of the group would compensate for the lack of their contribution. They made the following statements:

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“I cannot see a correlation here. That usually doesn't, because there are always people who do the work for this person who is a freerider.” (I-2)

“I think not actually, because someone else will compensate at the end, there's always a person who will put more effort into a situation. I don't think that the poor performance at the end is that much different because someone is always afraid to get a bad grade, is always afraid to embarrass oneself.” (I-3)

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4.5. Summary analysis and revised framework

After conducting the analysis of the responses of the interviewees, there was a rearrangement of the framework developed in the literature part. While most of the factors remain intact, additional factors emerged from the analysis regarding the factors that impact social loafing in multicultural teams. Figure 8 demonstrates the revised framework and all the factors that impact social loafing in international teams according to this analysis.

Figure 5: Framework social loafing in international teams

(Source: own)

Again, at the left hand-side of the framework are listed the factors that impact social loafing positively, namely, these factors increase the likelihood of encountering social loafing behavior in teams. As already mentioned and elaborated in the literature review as well as the analysis part, team size, task characteristics and the expectations of the behaviors of others increase the possibility of social loafing. Team composition in terms of skills heterogeneity was also responsible for increasing social loafing behavior. In terms of team personality composition, this analysis showed that the personality dimension extraversion was seen as negatively related to social loafing, which is contradiction with previous literature. Extroverted individuals were seen by the interviewees as more talkative, contributing more to the team discussions and often taking the lead of the team projects. While very few interviewees expressed clear opinion on neuroticism as a personality dimension, there were reference that personality types which were more dominant and more aggressive negatively impact the motivation of other team members, therefore leading to more social loafing in team.

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At the right hand-side of the framework are listed the factors that negatively influence social loafing. Team cohesion, social comparison, rewards, high self-efficacy and team surface composition in terms of gender and age were again confirmed to increase motivation and reduce the desire to freeride in teams, consisting with previous research. However, the analysis of team personality composition generated diverse results in comparison to the literature. While conscientiousness was affirmed to reduce social loafing, agreeableness was seen as a double- edged sword. Agreeable individuals avoid conflict and care for better communication in team, however, it might lead individuals to accept tasks or behaviors that are not particularly comfortable with, leading thus to an increased probability of remaining more passive in the group works. Moreover, openness to experience, which is seen as the weakest predictor of social loafing, is a major demotivational factor for social loafing in international teams, according to the current analysis. When team members are more open to new ways of working, they are more capable of adapting to the new styles that are presented by the other multinational team members. Lastly, the factors peer review and feedback were not included in the revised framework, as according to the interviewees, although they might modify the behavior slightly, they do not greatly change the contribution in the end. Thus, they were left out of the framework.

In international teams, there are additional circumstances that impact social loafing. First and foremost, it is crucial to emphasize the importance of language skills. The lack of language proficiency leads automatically to social loafing, as the team members are not able to perform the necessary tasks without the language knowledge. However, although most of the interviewees expressed that this was frustrating for them, it was still seen as an accepted “truth”, and the team members who did possess the necessary language skills were forced into social compensation. Another factor that was mentioned during this interview was communication. The lack of open and clear communication might lead to social loafing, as the team members have different concepts over contribution and their behavior in team. Therefore, the interviewees stress that clearly communicating the expectations for every team member helps in reducing social loafing behavior. The next factor that resulted from this analysis is the perception of fairness. The interviewees responded that they felt that it would be unfair to engage in social loafing, as the other team members would have a double amount of work if they did so. Cultural intelligence also impacts the contribution of team members. This factor is responsible more for making team members aware of what others expect from them, as well as know what to expect from others. Lastly, the cultural dimension collectivism-individualism was not included in the framework, as the majority of interviewees did not see this as a factor that impacts social loafing. Although it was reported that culture does impact social loafing to some extent, the interviewees reported experiencing social loafing with both types of culture.

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Finally, the analysis also included a section over the effect of social loafing on performance. According to the responses of the majority of interviewees, performance is impacted even when team members try to compensate for the ones who are freeriding. The literature predicts that if social compensation effect happens, then the performance will not necessarily suffer. However, only three of the interviewees shared this opinion. The rest agreed that performance will be affected depending on the amount of work, the skill-level required and the time pressure.

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5. Discussion

Teamwork is one of the crucial ways of work organization in enterprises and also in a university context; therefore, team effectiveness has been a central topic in different streams of literature for the past five decades. Understanding how teams work, which challenges they face, and how to overcome these challenges, is of high importance in order to boost team productivity. Moreover, due to the advances in globalization and companies becoming international, the number of multicultural teams has increased significantly in the last decades. Multicultural teams are faced with additional challenges, as the dimension of cultural backgrounds adds extra complexity in terms of conflict resolution and communication.

One of the main issues emerging in teams discussed in three literature streams, namely social psychology, economics and management, is social loafing. Social loafing is the decrease of effort when people work in teams as opposed to when working individually (Latané et al., 1979). This concept has been researched substantially over the past decades; however, there is a lack of an integrated framework that summarizes all the aspects that impact social loafing in general, and more specifically in international teams. The aim of this thesis was precisely to unveil these factors and examine how they impact international team’s dynamics. Moreover, the current literature on social loafing is scarce and presents contradictory findings. Therefore, this thesis will focus on exploring once again what influences social loafing in international teams. This broad question was divided into three sub-questions, which will be elaborated in the following paragraphs.

5.1. Sub-question 1: What leads to social loafing in multicultural teams

The aim of the first sub-question is to understand which factors increase the likelihood of social loafing happening in teams in general. Social loafing can be impacted by a number of factors, some being individual differences of the team members while others being connected to the way the team is designed (Shaw et al., 2000). The factors that contribute to an increase in the freeriding behavior and lead to team members withholding their effort while working in teams are team size, task characteristics, team surface composition and team deep composition, and expectations of the behaviors of other team members, as derived by the literature on social loafing.

Larger groups lead to team members decreasing their effort and withholding contribution (Valacich et al., 1995). As the groups get larger, the visibility of each team member gets lower, the responsibility of individual team members also decreases, and the connections among the team members get less personal (Alnuaimi et al., 2010), thus decreasing group coherence. All these drawbacks in larger groups, paired with the increased difficulty in coordination and communication

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among the members lead to increased levels of social loafing. These results of the literature were also confirmed during the analysis. 100% of the interviewees agreed that social loafing is more present in bigger teams, confirming the claims of the literature that increasing team size leads to more social loafing.

The task itself can also be a reason why members might decide to decrease their effort. Specific task characteristics such as high task interdependence, low task visibility (Liden et al., 2004) and low task routineness (Jones, 1984) make team members more prone to restraining their contribution, due to the fact that they cannot be held responsible for their lack of effort. In addition to task characteristics, social loafing is also impacted by task structure, which determines on which team member the final output is dependent on. Fort disjunctive and conjunctive tasks, where the final performance is dependent on respectively the strongest and the weakest team member, the possibility of social loafing is higher compared to conjunctive tasks (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). Concerning the task characteristics, this research gets different results compared to the earlier literature. While in previous research high task interdependence was noticed to increase social loafing due to the lower visibility of individual inputs, this analysis concludes that higher task interdependence might even be beneficial in reducing social loafing. The interviewees argued this statement by explaining that when tasks are highly interdependent, there is a higher possibility of exercising more control over the team members who are withholding their effort. Moreover, since interdependence means that everyone would be aware of what the others are doing, it can serve as a correcting mechanism, when noticed that some of the team members are not working in the right direction. Moreover, task structure was reported to be of significance, in terms of task division. The interviewees stated that a clear task division according to the interests of each team member would decrease social loafing.

An additional factor influencing the amount of contribution in teams is the team composition itself. Team composition refers to the mix of personalities and team member diversity (Senior & Swailes, 2004). This diversity can be analyzed at the surface level and deep level. The factors included in the surface level team composition are cognitive skills (Doll et al., 2017), age, gender, cultural background, and tenure in the company (Bell, 2007). The surface level team composition can impact team dynamics, team performance and also the tendency to loaf. Doll et al. (2017) found that in teams with heterogeneous levels of abilities, team members are more engaged in social loafing than in teams where the members have homogenous ability distribution. Regarding gender and age, it can be said that the tendency to withhold effort while working teams is observed more in men than in woman (Byun et al., 2020; Tok, 2019; Karau & Williams, 1993; de Pillis et al., 2015) and also with younger people rather than older people (Tok, 2019; Quadri et al.,2012). In terms of surface team composition, it was again noticed in this research that a disparity in the level of the

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skillset of the team members leads to more social loafing, or at least a passive behavior during teamwork, meaning that the team members who perceive themselves as less knowledgeable than others, will not include themselves in team discussions. This inclination was reported for self- behavior, as well as observed in other team members.

The next dimension of team composition includes the deep level factors, which are personality, beliefs, attitudes and values (Bell, 2007). In terms of personality, the literature analyzes team member behavior based on the Big 5 Personality framework, which includes five personality dimensions, namely, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to new experience, agreeableness and neuroticism (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Two of these personality dimensions are seen as contributors to social loafing behavior, extraversion and neuroticism. Individuals who score high on extraversion are more prone to withholding effort in teams compared to the ones who score low on extraversion (Ülke & Bilgic, 2011). Similarly, individuals who score high in neuroticism gravitate towards displaying more team disruptive behavior and more social loafing compared to the ones who score low in neuroticism (Brown et al., 2004; Ülke & Bilgic, 2011). Other factors composing the deep level composition are beliefs, attitudes and values. Under these concepts it had been analyzed the preference for group work and the degree of individualism or collectivism that characterizes an individual’s background. Having a low preference for group work has been found to increase the social loafing tendency (Stark et al., 2007) similarly to coming from an individualistic culture (Earley, 1989). However, for the purpose of this thesis, only personality composition was researched further. The dimension of neuroticism in this research was also reported to lead to social loafing, however indirectly. The interviewees were reluctant to say whether any of their team members would have been highly neurotic, however, did admit that personality traits such as over commanding or overcontrolling would lead them to be less interested in contributing to the teamwork. The dimension of extraversion seems to foster contribution as mentioned by the interviewees, as extroverted team members are more inclined to participate in discussions and often like to take the lead of the group. This is in contradiction with the findings of Ülke & Bilgic (2011), where they claim that extraversion has a tendency to lead to social loafing.

Lastly, social loafing behavior is impacted by the expectations of how the other group members will behave in terms of contribution. This existing literature demonstrates contradictory findings regarding the reaction to the expectations of other team member’s behavior. While Jackson & Harkins (1985) stated that team members tend to withhold effort when they expect the others to do the same, Williams & Karau (1991) state that team members increase their contribution when they expect other team members to withhold effort during their teamwork.

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This research however, got different results. According to the findings of this analysis, expecting that other team members will contribute more would increase the desire to contribute rather than decrease it. The reasons mentioned for that include competition among the team members, as well as the desire to not be the worst member of a team. This dimension is also interlinked with social comparison in this sense, which in itself is a factor that minimizes social loafing in teams.

5.2. Sub-question 2: How to avoid social loafing in multicultural teams?

The second sub-question is concerned with discovering the factors that motivate team members to contribute and, consequently, reduce the tendency to withhold effort in teams. These factors are social connections, reward and evaluation systems, team cohesion and team identity, team composition in terms of personality traits, the degree of self-efficacy of the individual team members and the collective efficacy of the team as a whole, peer-evaluation, feedback and lastly, social comparison.

When team members regard each other as friends, they have a tendency to contribute more to the team project and not engage in social loafing and freeriding behavior (Rank & Tuschke, 2010; De Paola et al., 2019). The reason for this outcome lies in the type of communication, as friends tend to be more open to one another which leads to easier cooperation and lowers the potential for conflicts (Strong & Anderson, 1990). Therefore, in teams where the individuals are able to self- select, one might notice less social loafing than in randomly chosen teams (Bandiera et al., 2013). These results were also confirmed in this research, however, not as straight forward as it was also pointed out that having friendships in a team might work as a double-edged sword. While having friends in a team increases motivation and contribution for various reasons, it was also stated that having friends in a team can have a negative impact, as it would increase the tolerance for social loafing. On the one hand, the interviewees argued that they themselves would not engage in social loafing if the team was composed of friends, as they would find it difficult to disappoint or let down their friends. On the other hand, the presence of friendships in teams might lead to a higher tolerance for social loafing, as reported by interviewees. Furthermore, having friends in a team could lead to higher inefficiency, as team members would interact socially during work time.

Team cohesion is another influential aspect that decreases the tendency to loaf. It represents the degree to which team members value their membership in the team (Karau & Hart, 1998). Team cohesion and team identity also reduce social loafing behavior (Thompson et al., 2015) while in non-cohesive teams the members tend to reduce their efforts while working in the team (Karau & Williams, 1997). Like with social connections, members of cohesive teams can easily coordinate and be efficient, thus resulting also in higher performance. The results of this research for team

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cohesion were evident and clear. Supporting the existing literature, here it was also shown that team cohesion, and the perception of a “fit” within a team has a considerable impact in increasing the desire to contribute and decreasing the tendency to withhold effort.

Rewards are known as a great mediator for increasing motivation and performance (Cacioppe, 1999), and they are negatively correlated to social loafing (Ofole, 2020). The rewards can be considered as individual or team-based and as external or internal. The use of individual performance-based rewards increases the motivation of the individual team members making them contribute more to a team (Blazovich, 2013). Team based rewards can either lead to more social loafing or more contribution, depending on team dynamics. Since the rewards are shared among all the team members, each member gets the same reward, independently of their input, assuming that the latter cannot be measured. Therefore, using a hybrid reward system, which is a combination of team based and individual performance-based rewards result in a lower probability of encountering social loafing behavior within a team (Pearsall et al., 2010; Bryant et al., 2009). As predicted by the large body of research, rewards increase motivation and the possibility that the team members will contribute. This analysis confirmed these findings once again. The presence of rewards does not only motivate team members to not freeride, but also heads them to compensate for the lack of contribution of other team members when necessary. Further, this analysis showed that both external and internal rewards are important for team members. While the presence of internal rewards increases motivation, it is nonetheless not effective if external rewards are not present.

Team composition also plays a crucial role in reducing social loafing. As mentioned in the sections above, the gender and the age of the team members can make a prediction of whether a team member is more likely to loaf or not. As the literature suggests, women are less likely to social loaf due to the fact that they put more importance into the social aspect of the group, therefore leading to more commitment. This analysis also pointed out that women, at least in a university context, are less likely to loaf, as stated by the majority of the interviewees. In terms of personality composition, three out of five dimensions of the Big 5 Personality framework are connected to lower social loafing tendencies, precisely, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience. While conscientiousness is positively related to individual performance and negatively correlated with social loafing, conscientious individuals might even go a step further and engage in social compensation (Schippers, 2014) as they are not only focused on achieving their own goals but the team goals as well (Tok, 2019). Agreeable individuals tend to have better interpersonal relationships in teams, leading to lower conflict opportunities and increased team cohesion. Ülke & Bilgic (2011) and Schippers (2014) found that agreeable individuals have a tendency to engage less in social loafing. The last personality trait to discuss is openness to

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experience. Although openness to experience is connected to high performance and increased motivation (Bell, 2007; Klehe & Anderson, 2007), the literature does not find a significant correlation of this dimension with social loafing, either positively or negatively. This analysis also confirms that conscientiousness has a significant impact on reducing social loafing. The results for agreeableness and openness to experience vary slightly from the literature. While agreeableness has been seen as a predictor for the decrease in social loafing behavior, as agreeable individuals desire to avoid conflict, some of the interviewees in this analysis did not see that in a positive light. Agreeableness can influence also negatively when agreeable team members are inclined to take responsibilities or tasks that they are not comfortable with, for the sake of avoiding conflict. Openness to experience has been seen as the dimension that least predicts whether someone will loaf or not, however, in an international context, there seemed to be a correlation between openness to experience, increased motivation and reduced social loafing. As multicultural teams present team members with several challenges, and new ways of working, thinking and completing tasks, being open to accepting these new ways increases the chances that individuals will feel more inclined to contribute to the team tasks, as stated by some of the interviewees.

Social loafing is also minimized by peer-evaluation (Aggarwal & O’Brien, 2008) and feedback (Orden et al.,1998). While feedback provides a basis for corrective action (Brooks & Ammons, 2003), peer evaluation increases exposure and visibility (Frash et al., 2004) thus lowering the desire to withhold effort. Moreover, the use of peer evaluation increases the accountability of each team member. While the literature predicts that these two factors influence the reduction of social loafing, this analysis did not demonstrate the same results. According to the responses of the interviewees, none of these factors actually influence into making a team member put more effort than just enough, according to the experiences of the interviewees. Feedback does not change the behavior if the individual team member is not prior motivated and peer review also fails to motivate individuals to put more effort. The interviewees stated that peer review slightly changes the behavior, so that the team members who were withholding effort try to show more interest in the teamwork, nonetheless, as reported during this research, this change in behavior is often not significant into improving their contribution. Moreover, as in some cases the rest of the team members are not expected to review their team members very harshly, this can decrease the effectiveness of the peer review concept. Several interviewees reported that they would not write a negative review at the end, despite the lack of contribution, as they would not want to damage the other team members. Moreover, even in cases where bad reviews are written, these represent a substantially softer version of how others did not contribute. For this reason, the effects of peer reviewing are not as strong in motivating team members to contribute.

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A high degree of self-efficacy and collective efficacy also impact social loafing tendencies (Sanna, 1992; Mulvey & Klein, 1998). Self-efficacy moderates the behavior based on the expectations of owns behavior, thus, acting accordingly to those expectations (Sanna, 1992). Thus, individuals who have high self-efficacy might engage less in social loafing if they believe that they are capable of contributing to the task. Similarly, groups with higher collective-efficacy also tend to have a better performance than groups with lower collective-efficacy and the members display less social loafing tendencies (George & Feltz, 1995; Licharcz & Partington, 1996). Self-efficacy was perceived by most of the interviewees as self-confidence. It was reported in this analysis also that having low self-efficacy leads to more social loafing. The interviewees stated that in situations where they felt that their contribution would not be of good quality, they would rather stay passive. Moreover, they also noticed this type of behavior in other team members, where the ones who did not think they would deliver a task of comparable quality to the rest of the team members, they decreased their contribution at all.

Lastly, social comparison seems to be a factor that positively influences performance when input is visible (Michinov & Primois, 2005), meaning that team members put more effort when they see other members performing better. However, there is little research connecting social comparison to social loafing behavior. While there is a part of literature stating that social comparison can increase motivation and might reduce social loafing, there is a lack of focus into the phenomenon very deeply. This analysis indeed confirms that for some individuals, social comparison motivates them not only to reduce social loafing, but to put additional effort on delivering a high-quality output as well. However, it must be noted that the interviewees who reported this increase in motivation by comparing themselves to the best group members, also reported having a high degree of intrinsic motivation and competition orientation.

5.3. Sub-question 3: How does cultural diversity influence social loafing?

The third sub-question addresses the issue of social loafing in international teams. This analysis also showed two other factors that reduce the freeriding behavior in international teams. One of them was communication and stating clear expectations and the other one was the perception of fairness. Communication helps reduce social loafing as it clearly demonstrates what is expected of each team member. Moreover, open communication lets other team members know how the rest of the team perceives their behavior, as well as makes it clear why a certain individual is withholding their effort. Furthermore, communication fosters trust in teams, which can lead to additional team cohesion and the creation of friendships, which are both factors that reduce social loafing. The next factor that emerged during this research was the concept of fairness. Most of the interviewees stated that they would not engage in social loafing because they would feel that this

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type of behavior would be unfair towards their team members. Moreover, they felt unfairness when other team members were freeriding, which led to more frustration feelings and a decrease in motivation.

While the main focus point of this thesis was to understand the influence of culture on social loafing behavior, this analysis like in the existing literature, presents again contradictory results. While all interviewees acknowledge that culture is a crucial factor that influences the team dynamics and the behavior of individual team members, in regard to social loafing the opinions and experiences varied. While the three CEMS students asserted that social loafing is a phenomenon that is not connected to culture, the rest of the interviewees expressed that indeed culture does have an impact on social loafing, although not necessarily directly. Culture impacts the expectations of the contribution of each individual. In international teams, where people from different cultural backgrounds come together, there are different expectations of how much everybody should contribute, therefore, leading to some of the team members contributing less and thus taking a freeride in the group projects.

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6. Conclusion, limitations and future research

The aim of this thesis was to unveil the effect of cultural diversity on social loafing in multicultural teams. It can be said that social loafing is a complex phenomenon, which is impacted greatly by several different factors and contexts. The added complexity of culture makes this type of behavior even more challenging in multicultural teams. Because this research question is multifaceted in nature, this thesis was divided into three sub-questions. The first sub-question dealt with understanding the general factors that positively impact social loafing in any type of team, that is, the factors that increase the likelihood of social loafing behavior. The second sub-question was concerned with analyzing the factors that hinder social loafing behavior in teams. Lastly, the third sub-question was designed to understand the impact of cultural background on social loafing and whether certain cultural dimensions make an individual more prone to social loafing.

The results of sub-question one showed that the factors that positively impact social loafing are team size, task characteristics, expectations of the behaviors of others, team surface-composition skills heterogeneity, and team personality composition. Sub-question two concluded that the factors that negatively impact social loafing are team cohesion, social connection, social comparison, self-efficacy, reward, and lastly, team composition. Finally, the third sub-question concluded that culture does have an impact on social loafing, although not always directly. This thesis did not conclude that any specific culture is more prone to social loafing than others; rather, that the cultural background influences the expectations of other team members about contribution. Further, culture creates additional challenges for multicultural teams, such as difficulties in communication that can lead to an increased social loafing behavior among the team members. All in all, it can be said that multicultural teams are impacted by all the factors that influence also monocultural teams, while facing additional factors which are culturally impacted. The factors that impact the most in multicultural teams are language skills, cultural intelligence, communication and the perception of fairness, as resulted by this empirical research.

This thesis has of course certain limitations. First, although all interviewees provided very useful insights, the number of interviewed participants is considerably small indicating that the generalizability of the thesis. Second, although the team members have significant experience in multicultural teams, their experience is limited mostly to university work. Only two of the interviewees had work experience in a multicultural environment. Third, the topic in itself is considerably complex. Especially for the personality dimensions, most of the interviewees found it hard to assign certain personality types to the freeriding team members they had in the past. The interviewees mentioned very seldom cases when they themselves decided to engage in social

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loafing. Understandably, their answers are mostly based on their own interpretation regarding the behavior of others.

Further research is needed to explore the role of culture and multicultural team dynamics on social loafing. For example, it is crucial to further examine the impact of all Hofstede’s cultural dimensions on social loafing more closely and for an extended period of time. While a qualitative analysis gives insights from the side of the team members, it is not able to monitor their actual behavior. In order to overcome this obstacle, future research can focus on collecting time series data in order to conduct a more thorough analysis. Moreover, further exploration is needed to understand the role of awareness, character traits and past experiences on social loafing.

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8. Appendix

Appendix 1: Interview guide

Phase 1: Briefing of the participant (before interview)

• Welcoming • Short introduction into the topic • Briefing about audio recording, use of data and anonymity

Phase 2: Unbiased approach

• Have you ever experienced social loafing or free riding in an international team setting? • What were the main differences when you worked with monocultural teams as opposed to international teams in terms of contribution to the task? • Did you have any case when you felt like not every team member was contributing to the common task? Why did you think they were not fully invested, what are the reasons? • Which one was the team you felt yourself the most productive and which was the most unproductive? What could be the reason for this?

Phase 3: Focused Approach

• Based on this framework from your perspective which are the most important factor that influence social loafing? Is there anything missing? How should it be adopted? • From your experience is there a difference between intercultural and monocultural teams? What are the main differences? • In cases where some members were not contributing, how did that impact the performance of the team?

Phase 4: Resume

• Based on what we have been talking, what would it take to avoid social loafing in your future team experiences (mono and intercultural team settings)?

Phase 5: Closing • Ask for remaining questions • Clarify the use of data and anonymity (again because now they know what they said) • Thank interviewee for participation

November, 2020 Verona Bardhoku 102 /102