Management personnel in the financial services industry on average receive lower scores on a standard stress inventory than do clerical personnel. This curious fact can be explained by the phenomenon of social loafing. Social loafing is:
àthe tendency of individual group members to reduce their work effort as groups increase in size as displayed by the inclination to "goof off" when performance is needed in a group, miss meetings, show up late, or fail to start or complete individual tasks (ôSocial Loafingö).
The effect of social loafing in a group is to produce a lower group satisfaction and lower group productivity. Mulvey, Bowes-Sperry, and Klein found that ôthe presence of a social loafer in a real-life work group was related to lower group satisfaction and lower group productivityö (Welter, Canale, Fiola, et al.). These findings might be validated in studies using participants of American or European backgrounds, where the corporate culture is prevalent. Social loafing is not as likely to be as prevalent in the corporate cultures of China or Japan, where the ethnic culture mitigates against loafing. In those cultures, the number of people in a group is more likely to increase rather than decrease productivity, as workers are more dedicated to their jobs. Workers in these cultures are more committed to their jobs than those of American or European heritage. They consider their jobs virtually a lifetime commitment, similar to a marriage: ôJapanese workers have lower rates of absenteeism than American workers, work longer hours on average, and seldom use all of their allotted vacation timeö (Camp, 4).
The social loafing prevalent in American and European cultures is an indication that people in general tend to do just enough work to get by and that they gauge how much work that is by assessing how much work they believe the rest of the group is doing or is capable of doing. This indicates that their fu
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