How much has my co-worker contributed? The impact of anonymity and feedback on social loafing in asynchronous virtual collaboration

Fang Chen, Limin Zhang and Joseph Latimer

International Journal of Information Management, 2014, vol. 34, issue 5, 652-659

Abstract: This paper reports an experiment that investigates how feedback about co-worker's performance and anonymity affect a team member's performance in an idea generation task conducted asynchronously. The results indicated that there was no main effect of anonymity: anonymity by itself did not affect group performance. Receiving information about co-worker's performance increased group performance; however, the perceived level of co-worker's performance did not affect group performance. Participants who perceived that their co-workers had high performance experienced significantly more social comparison with identified input than with anonymous input. However, this motivation gain did not translate into a performance gain. Implications of these results and future research are discussed.

Keywords: Virtual collaboration; asynchronous collaboration, virtual team, social loafing, social comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ininma:v:34:y:2014:i:5:p:652-659

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2014.05.001

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