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Off The Record #14: Get back to work, slacker!
Understanding whether gender composition of a group affects individual effort
By the Busara OTR Team. Special thanks to Kate Musen, Syon Bhanot and Esther Owelle for their input, research and collaboration on this piece.
Anyone who had to do group work in university knows that it was always the worst. It was even worse if you found yourself stuck with that one person who everyone knew would do nothing but got all the credit. How did such people survive?
There’s a name to this behaviour — social loafing. With a large part of adult life being group work, companies are now more invested in understanding how social loafing translates to the modern workspace — and how to stop it.
While there’s a lot of research on social loafing and some evidence that men tend to loaf more than women, little is known about how loafing is affected by gender composition of groups. We ran a lab experiment in which we measured the work effort of participants in groups with different gender compositions. By learning more about this we can better design interventions that minimize monitoring and work effort.
Specifically, we wanted to answer the following questions:
- How does individual effort differ when working in a group compared to working individually?
- Does effort in a group setting vary with gender composition?
- How does group composition affect the change in effort?
- How do people’s perceptions of effort vary based on gender and/or group composition?
We did this by getting respondents to sort rice and lentils. Once we had randomly selected a sample of 388 participants from Kibera, a low income informal settlement in Nairobi county, we conducted a two stage experiment, exploring how the gender ratios within groups affected the propensity for social loafing
And it turns out gender doesn’t matter — the increment in effort when working as a group was consistent across genders.
Our Research Design
In the first stage of the experiment participants were given an effort task where they sorted rice and lentils on their own, which enabled us to measure their baseline ability. Each participant was given 10 minutes and they earned KES 12 ($0.12) for every gram they sorted. The grams the participants sorted were then weighed using a weighing scale.
In the second stage of the experiment, participants were assigned to groups of four individuals, which varied in gender composition as indicated in the table below:
Participants were introduced to their group members to see the gender composition of their group. They were later split to sort the lentils and rice and informed that the amount they earn (again, KES 12 for every gram) will be divided equally among the four of them.
After completing the task, participants were asked about:
- The gender composition of their group
- The number of people in the group, and
- Their best guess regarding the percentage of the task that other group members completed.
What did we find?
In the group setting, participants’ effort increased significantly by more than 20% for both men and women. Women on average exerted 0.41 ounces of effort when in groups, compared to 0.34 ounces when working individually. Men on the other side exerted 0.35 ounces of effort when in groups, compared to 0.29 ounces when working as individuals.
From this we first learned that, despite earning lower in groups than individually, participants were more likely to put their best foot forward in a group setting, regardless of gender.
The difference in performance between men and women could be attributed to the nature of the task, which is traditionally associated with women. It was noted in all settings. When conducting the task individually, women sorted more grams than men, while groups with more women on average achieved better results than groups with more men. Compared to the women-only group, the men-only group significantly sorted 0.05 grams less of lentils while this effort reduced to 0.04 grams for the 2-men and 2-women group. Similarly, the group consisting of 3 men and 1 woman sorted 0.05 grams less, again compared to the women-only group.
While men contributed less than women in the group effort task, their increase in effort from individual to group setting is similar to that of women (about 20%). Thus we cannot say that the men exerted less effort in group than women from this task.
What about when it comes to how much work we think we did?
Groups consisting of only men thought that men did about 53% of the work while groups with only women thought men did 32% of the work. Groups with only women thought women did about 50% of the work, while groups with only men thought women did only 26% of the work. Men not only have a higher perception of their own labor, but also a lower perception of the labor of women. Also, despite the results showing women are contributing more both in groups and individually, men are still more confident than women in their contribution to the larger group outcome.
Majority of life’s tasks are done in groups i.e government initiatives. Findings from this study show that people are likely to put in more effort in their tasks, activities when they conduct them in groups as compared to when they do it individually. And it turns out gender doesn’t matter — the increment in effort when working as a group was consistent across genders. Working together inspires people to maximize their full potential and, ultimately, to work even harder.
A final note:
Our goal is to make research accessible in order to start, continue or inform conversations that help us to better understand human behavior.
As a commitment to Open Science, we keep this anonymized data live for all our on-going research efforts.
This blog post is part of our larger “Off The Record” initiative where we share findings from small-scale research projects, designed to collect initial data and kick-start a conversation.
If you would like to learn more about a specific human behavior or have a research idea you think we could explore for a future “Off The Record”, please reach out to us on via email.
