Effects of Perceived Social Loafing, Social Interdependence, and Group Affective Tone on Students’ Group Learning Performance

This study investigates how students perceived social loafing and social interdependence influence group learning performance through group affective tone in undergraduate hospitality and tourism curricula. A questionnaire survey was administered to collect data from college students majoring hospitality and tourism management at four Taiwanese universities. Of 660 distributed questionnaires, 634 questionnaires were returned, accounted for a 96 % response rate. To justify the aggregated individual data to the group level, this study used the within-group inter-rater agreement ( r wg ) to assess and determine 123 valid learning groups for data analysis. The analytical results show that group affective tone significantly mediates the effect of social loafing and social interdependence on group productivity, but not on group final grades. Specific implications and suggestions are also discussed.