How Peer Pressure Stops Freeloaders On Team Projects

According to a variety of studies, when people are paid according their team's output instead of individual incentives, there are significant issues with free-riding. If it's difficult for others to tell who does what on a project, people exert less effort

That's a significant problem for organizations that have many employees working on large, collaborative projects, and it's particularly irritating for people who see freeloaders take credit for their work

A new study from Brice Corgnet and Steven Rassenti at Chapman University finds that the effect is particularly large, even caused by the ability to waste time in the internet. In their experiment, people with individual incentives spent 11.9 percent of their time browsing the internet. People in teams spent 28.5 percent wasting time on the internet, making them, on average, 32.8 percent less productive.

There's actually an easy way to reduce the problem. The author's experiment included a system where each team member could anonymously monitor peers to find out whether they were browsing the internet or producing for the organization. People were informed in real time if others were watching them, inducing social pressure.

The system actually worked quite well:

"...a large proportion of subjects (88.3%) decided to monitor others. However, subjects dedicated only a small proportion of their time (4.4%) to monitoring activities, compared with the proportion of their time subjects spent working (82.5%) or browsing the Internet (13.1%). Yet, all subjects were being watched for an average of 22.4% of their time. Team members shared the monitoring burden and maintained peer pressure during the whole duration of the experiment."

And it had a huge impact on productivity:

We find evidence of strong peer pressure effects when comparing organizations endowed with peer monitoring and team incentives with organizations relying on team incentives alone. Production was 47.1% higher and Internet usage was 54.1% lower under peer pressure

They were able to close the gap between team and individual performance, without punishment, confrontation, or even physical proximity.

This is obviously a solution with some problems. It's intrusive and raises privacy concerns. Still, it makes it clear that for either a whole organization or individual team, a small amount of pressure and monitoring can go a long way.

Find the paper here.

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