Social Loafing! Who is Responsible?

Managing the organizational behavior of individuals working in organizations is a challenge as far as human resources are concerned. Companies spend billions of dollars per year in human resources of their organization in the form of employee fees, incentives, cultural programs, highlights of the year, motivational programs, and lots of other similar kind of organizational methods to bring around motivational power in employees. Most of the times we see employees get easily de-motivated by the steps taken by the management of the organization, organizations are a huge outlet, a manager at the topmost hierarchy may not know the person working at the lowest of hierarchy so it gets sometimes difficult for them to recognize an individual effort and thus it creates restlessness amongst the workers and thus it gives rise to the social loafers, who hardly give any contribution to the team projects happening in the organization. So are we to blame ourselves for not understanding the real situation or are the organizations creating such indifference themselves? More or less no one is responsible for such situation; it happens unknowingly by the lack of determination, inability to confide, no focusing power or may be due to the partial behavior of the bosses.

Organizations held the workshops with the only aim of developing teams, learning to work together, share their tips and tricks and also exchange the process ideas. Getting team work done from their employees are one of the biggest challenges for managers in any organization as each individual’s thinking capabilities are different and their working processes are different. Every employee working in an organization urges to get a bigger and better position in the organization but its only when their efforts are not recognized do they feel the urge to social loaf, these are a particular group of employees named as social loafers, they believe in giving less effort to the organizational functions or needs. Even when social loafers are working in team, they might not feel any urge to work as team and give their efforts in achieving organizational goals. Social loafing normally occurs in teams where there are more members, each of them give lesser efforts than what they usually might have done as an individual. Each employee feels no need to work at their optimum best, as others are there to take care of their work and also some may social loaf due to lack of confidence to tackle the problems, fear of being recognized if the task is not done properly, some people are just introvert they don’t like to take up challenges or face anyone, they are grooved to their work always and don’t like to either give any positive support or response to other people in the team.

A team is said to be successful only if it is able to complete their objectives and fulfill the obligations as a team, the teams justifies their existence only when it is capable of adding value to its numbers in the sense it should be giving more output than what is actually expected of them. All the employees expect to cut short their work and live a high life like their bosses, taking up the responsibility and determined attitude to complete a particular task are what the real teams are made of, anyone would like to sit back and relax and expect things to happen – its only human nature.

Sometimes employees feel ignored when their efforts and hard work are not recognized, they feel that their contribution is not properly evaluated and thus they don’t feel an urge to give their continuous efforts to the team. Companies cannot keep an eye on each and every individual and whoever comes out as a winner or an achiever, they reward them. Employees should be made more aware of their responsibilities and define individual tasks in processes or as a team then it would be better to evaluate their performance looking at their individual outputs. Team is definitely a one-man-ship but not all the employees take it otherwise, so its company’s responsibilities to bifurcate the work for each employee and select a common leader who will guide the team.