Social Loafing Essay

Not all of the teams work well. Such problem as free-riding, or social loafing, is quite a common one and is very difficult to resolve. A lot of managers and teachers struggle with it. Each and every team should have these 3 key elements: “Interaction, Information sharing and Influence over decision making” (Michael West, year).

The interaction is very important and it has to be present during teamwork as well as social. Both of the two kinds are essential and irreplaceable. So, if you want to increase the participation of the members, you should try to make the social bonding stronger by organizing parties, picnics, lunches and different kinds of sport games and events. This will definitely bring the feeling of trust, safety to your team and the level of involvement and participation will rise, diminishing free-riding by communication. Each person tries to to do his or her best in order to achieve team’s shared goals. Michael West (year) states that it is needed that a team meets at least once a month to share their interests and updates in an informal environment and minimally once in six month in order to

Information can be rich or poor, but it is important that the process of sharing is present, otherwise the team won’t be efficient. If everybody holds the information to themselves, a lot of people will not fully participate. Email, phone, Skype and other technologies are some examples of how information can easily be transferred, but mostly people just communicate face-to-face. According to Michael West (year), the richness of the information increases in face-to-face sharing, because of many things such as gestures, body language, facial expression and many other. This way also adds the possibility to really understand the problem. We also suggest that the contact is very important and it definitely decreases social loafing, so by maximizing it we solve a part of the