Social Loafing and Collectivism: A Comparison of the United States and the People's Republic of China

The present paper examines the effect of a central cultural value, individualism-collectivism, on social loafing in an organizational setting. A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that collectivistic beliefs influence the incidence of social loafing. Forty-eight managerial trainees each from the United States and the People's Republic of China worked on an in-basket task under conditions of low or high accountability and low or high shared responsibility. The results of regression analyses demonstrate the moderating role of collectivistic beliefs on social loafing, and they are discussed in terms of social responsibility and its relation to performance in work groups.