Social Comparison or Social Loafing: A Study of Anonymous Ideation in Virtual Teams

This study investigated the effects of social comparison and social loafing on group performance when groups engaged asynchronously in idea generation. The preliminary test result indicated that the effects of social comparison and social loafing co-existed, group members may have chosen to engage in different behaviors (social loafing vs. social comparison) in different group interactions, however, their choice did not seem to affect the number of solutions generated. On the other hand, group members tended to elaborate on the ideas that were generated by co-workers. As a result, groups with less social loafing produced richer elaboration on ideas generated.