Read the assignment and answer the 2 questions below: Exercise: Reducing Social

Question

Read the assignment and answer the 2 questions below:

Exercise: Reducing Social Loafing

Assume the role of a manager of a home improvements/building supply store that sells a wide range of products—including lumber, plumbing ?xtures, windows, and paint—to both commercial accounts and individual customers. The store is staffed by three types of employees who work in three different groups: (1) a group of six cashiers who check out purchases made by individuals on site; (2) a group of ?ve ?oor employees who help customers locate items they need, stock merchandise, and reshelve returns; and (3) a group of four employees who handle commercial accounts. All the employees are paid on an hourly basis. The cashiers and ?oor employees earn the minimum wage; the commercial account employees earn one and a half times the minimum wage.

You are pleased with the performance of the cashiers and the commercial account employees. The ?oor employees, however, seem to be putting forth less effort than they should. On several occasions, customers have complained about not being able to ?nd items, and you personally have located the items for them even though there were ample ?oor employees on duty. The ?oor employees do not seem busy, and their workloads have not increased recently, yet they have a backlog of work to be done, including stocking of new merchandise and reshelving.

Despite their backlog, you often see members of this group chatting with each other, taking cigarette breaks outside the back of the store, and making personal telephone calls—all outside their regularly scheduled breaks.

Questions

List 3 – 4 recommendations to reduce social loa?ng in the group of ?oor employees. (Refer to the ways to reduce social loafing as discussed in the chapter)

Do group members have an ethical responsibility to report shirkers to leadership? If you were working on a group project for a class and a group member was social loafing, would you communicate this information to the instructor? Why or why not?

MGMT-386 Organizational Behavior and Theory

Explanation / Answer

Social loafing can be define as a tendency of certain members of a specific group who put lesser efforts in a teamwork as compared to the efforts they should have put in the individual jobs.

Social loafing can affect the team diversely and reduce the overall efficiency as well as productivity of the team by a large margin. This factor directly affects the team.

Social loafing can lead to false assumptions that your stuff would be done by another team member which directly delays the overall project time and affect the timeline of the project as well. Mainly social loafing is done because of lack of motivation in 18 or laziness of an employee towards the specific task. If the employee has a diffusion of responsibility to contribute towards the organisation, social loafing occur.

Social loafing is one of the biggest contributor as in reducing the overall efficiency as well as productivity of an organisation. This is a specific term is also responsible for creating work gaps and increasing the overall cost as most of the projects are not done on time. High number of errors as most of the work is done in a hurry when the deadline is near, quality of the work decreases as number of errors are also increased in effect of social loafing.

If the group size is very big, the level of efforts for each and every people inside the group decreases as the group size increases as they think that the mass would do the job more efficiently. Large Expectations also play an important role in social loafing. Most of the times people think that expected person in an organisation would do their job as well and the specific job seem very easy to them. Best over expectation directly reduces the level of work and efficiency of the specific task.

Prevention of the social loafing is very important for each and every organisation to maintain the group performance as well as efficiency.

Some factors which can be followed to prevent the social loafing are as follows :-

• Creating smaller groups that increases the overall involvement and efforts.

• Every group should have standard rules and regulations that applies on each and every individual inside the team.

• Defining the task and assigning the responsibility while continuously evaluating the personal and collective progress should be done.

• Highlighting the specific achievements of individuals inside the tin can also be very beneficial for increasing the overall involvement and efforts of the individual and reducing the social loafing.

• Personalizing the group and engaging individuals in certain task can also be very beneficial for reducing the overall effect of the social loafing.

• Encouraging the team loyalty and asking to improve the continuous efforts could very effective for maintaining a balance between the team work.

Providing information to the instructor regarding social loafing can be done by a different mediums such as providing email to the instructor as well as directly informing instructor about the social loafing being done inside the group. Giving this confidential is essential to protect your identity from being revealed as it could create imbalance between you and your teammates. This type of approach would enable the fairness of the class as well as reduce the chances of social loafing.

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