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Social facilitation is influenced observers have on peoples or animal’s behaviors. When we are being observed doing a complicated task, we tend to perform worse because the presence of others makes us nervous. On the other hand though if we are performing a simple task we perform better and faster than usual in front of an audience. When a pianist for instance is attempting to learn a new piece in the presence of his classmates, he is more likely to learn more slowly than if he were practicing alone at home.
But if this were a piece he had been playing for years, he would play more beautifully in the presence of his audience than if he were alone at home. Social loafing is the difference of someone’s personal performance when he is in a group or alone. Research has shown that when in a group people tend to perform at lower levels than when being rated individually (Myers, 2009). Harkins & others 1980 tug-of-war experiment for example proves that each contestant pulls harder when he thinks he is pulling alone, but not as hard when he sees himself in a group (Myers, 2009).
This can also be called free-riding because the individual is leaving more work up to the team than he should. Free-riding is often seen in class projects, when one or two teammates leave the majority of the assigned work for the others to do (Janowsky, 2010). Section 2: The main place I see social loafing now is at my retail job, particularly when we get new shipment and need to do a floor change. My General manager simply writes down everything we need to pull out, box up, unpack, shelve, throw away, clean and price tag.
My Assistant Manager usually freaks out about everything so has to do, including paper work, and spends the entire time at the registers doing all of her “paper work”. The majority of the work therefore falls onto the Keyholder and two part-time Sales Associates. Section 3: In this example both the General Manager and Assistant Managers are free-riders because they both keep themselves busy or leave work early so that the majority of the work falls on the Associates and the Keyholder.
Between the three of us though we split up the work and complete it before leaving. But if we each had to work alone that day we would actually get more done individually than when we are all there together. The best way to avoid the uneven division of labor, such as this one, is to assign specific tasks to specified people, so that each person would be required to meet their own individual assignments. Holding each person personally accountable would minimize, if not avoid the social loafing phenomenon.