"Social Loafing And Collectivism: A Comparison Of The United States and the People's Republic of China" (original) (raw)

This paper tries to examine the effect of a central cultural value: individualism-collectivism on social loafing in an organizational setting. The main tested hypothesis is that collectivistic beliefs influence the incident of social loafing. In the study, 48 managerial trainees from the US and China worked under conditions of low or high accountability and responsibility. A regression analysis was then made on the results. In this paper, a hierarchical, moderated regression analysis was conducted on performance. The predictor variables in this case were Step One: " Shared Responsibility, Accountability and Collectivism " Step 2: SR X ACC, SR X COLL and ACC X COLL, Step 3: SR X ACC X COLL and Step 4: Country. On Table 3, we see that the hypothesized interaction of shared responsibility and accountability with collectivism. It is fair to say that in order to better understand the interaction, " scores for collectivism were dichotomized based on a median split and two additional analyses were conducted " The authors hypothesized that interaction would occur for shared responsibility and accountability for the individualistic sample, and the results support their hypothesis. In the figures, we can see that highly individualistic people performed poorest under high responsibility and low accountability situations whereas collectivistic people didn't show this kind of tendency and performed better under shared responsibility regardless of accountability. Also as a result, it is supported that collective Americans didn't exhibit social loafing while individualistic Chinese people did exhibit social loafing. Some main and two way effects were also observed: The beta for shared responsibility in the collectivistic group shown different results as there is a negative beta for the individualistic sample. When looked at the general regression, we see that it demonstrates an interaction of accountability and collectivism