Jory MacKay on May 14, 2025 What is social loafing? How to spot (and prevent) it
Social loafing is the perceived psychological phenomenon that people do less work when they’re in a group setting. Think of the classic “school project”, where one or two high-achievers do 80% of the work while the rest of the team “loaf around”.
Unfortunately, social loafing — or the perception of it — occurs in the workplace, too. When teammates see (or even think) that others are doing less work than them but still getting the same reward, it can cause conflict and demotivation.
In the worst case scenario, social loafing can even drive your best performers to leave.
But if you strip back the underlying causes of social loafing, it turns out employees aren’t inherently lazy, but instead often lack the direction, clarity, and accountability to contribute effectively. And that’s something you can change.
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What is social loafing? How does it impact teams?
Social loafing is the perceived psychological phenomenon that people do less work when they’re in a group setting.
In the workplace, this could be someone who is constantly late for meetings, never has their presentation slides ready, or simply doesn’t contribute to group problem-solving discussions.
Social loafing isn’t a new phenomenon. In the early 1900s, engineer Max Ringelmann carried out studies using a classic tug of war experiment. In the experiment, Ringelmann observed that team members put in less rope-pulling effort when they were on a team versus when they were asked to pull it on their own.
Since then, studies have shown the same behaviors in modern workplace environments, including in both co-located and remote teams.
This has led to a common consensus that if a task is new or complex, high-performing employees should work alone, whereas teams should share the load and work together on well-known, simple tasks.
But even when you distribute tasks in this way, social loafing can still cause problems for teams.
Let’s take a look at some impacts of team members “slacking off”:
- Interpersonal issues and unnecessary conflicts. Imbalances in effort and work can lead teams to become resentful of each other — especially those who feel like they’re “picking up the slack” for loafers. This resentment can spill out of team projects and lead to serious conflicts, drops in productivity, and lower team morale.
- Destroys team motivation. When a team isn’t pulling in the same direction, it can lead to demotivation across the board. This lack of motivation reduces team effectiveness and can lead to other issues such as quiet quitting, where everyone lowers their standards to the bare minimum.
- Lowers feelings of satisfaction at work. While we all work to get paid, most people need to feel a level of satisfaction and purpose in their roles to meet their psychological needs. The conflicts and lack of motivation from social loafing often lead to reduced satisfaction and a drop in employee engagement.
- Others “pick up the slack” and risk burnout. When team members start social loafing, it leaves others to pick up the slack. This puts extra pressure on those individuals, leaving them vulnerable to stress, anxiety, and ultimately burnout. Once the high-performers are burnt out, it leaves the team incapable of meeting their objectives.
- Your high-performers will leave. Mix poor team morale, unbalanced workload management, and the chance of burnout together, and it won’t be long until your best employees start looking elsewhere. Once they leave, you’ll be left with an underperforming team that requires costly re-recruitment.
Here’s the kicker though:
Even if team members aren’t actually “loafing”, just the perception of an imbalance in workload is enough to cause many issues.
Why does social loafing happen?
When most people first hear about social loafing, they think it’s simply the case of a bad hire that’s lazy, uninterested, and lacks the internal motivation to succeed. But studies have shown that simply isn’t true. Even the highest performers are susceptible to social loafing if the conditions are right.
Let’s take a look at the key reasons why employees might be driven to “loaf” around, even within a high-performing team:
Feeling disconnected from the team and objective
The biggest reason employees begin to loaf, is because they don’t feel connected to the team or the objective. Often, this is due to them not understanding how their work contributes to the bigger picture, or they’re unclear on their specific role within the group dynamic.
They feel like their opinion and input doesn’t matter
As an extension of the point above, when team members feel undervalued, they develop an inferiority complex, check out from tasks, and leave others to take the reins. This also leads to lower morale, self-worth, and engagement with the team and the organization.
Overly complex goals or plans
Over complexity can lead to other phenomena such as analysis paralysis and perfectionism. Both of these can stunt someone’s ability to solve problems, communicate, and make progress, which can be incorrectly diagnosed as social loafing.
The work isn’t interesting or challenging
We all need work that’s challenging to help us stay engaged. When team members are repeatedly given work that doesn’t align to their strengths or interests, motivation and engagement drops, which can lead to general disinterest and loafing.
Lack of confidence that the team will succeed
If you believe you can’t achieve the task ahead, it’s easy to think “what’s the point?” When the mountain seems too high to climb, it leads employees to feel overwhelmed, reducing motivation, engagement, and enthusiasm to participate.
Extended periods of “carrying the load” for the team
When high-performers have enough of taking on the extra load, they too turn into loafers in what’s known as “the sucker effect”. They feel like they’re being taken advantage of, so they decide to join the slackers and reduce their effort, too.
A lack of personal reward and accountability
In group settings, individuals regularly feel that their work may get “lost in the crowd”. Without the possibility of personal reward or recognition, employees find it difficult to get motivated, so take a back seat and let others in the team take the load instead.
The bottom line is that social loafing often isn’t an individual problem — it’s a leadership and workload management problem. Once you shift your mindset to understand what causes social loafing, you can start to reduce or even prevent it from happening on your team.
How to prevent social loafing on your team today
Employees aren’t inherently lazy (at least most of the time). Instead, social loafing is often a symptom of low motivation, engagement, or accountability that stems from poor leadership and management.
Here are a few tactics you can put in place to help your team members stay motivated and avoid social loafing:
Connect tasks to larger company strategies and goals
Avoiding social loafing begins by connecting your team to a greater purpose. In business, this means connecting the work your team does to the company strategy and goals to ensure everyone knows how they’re contributing to the greater mission.
- Start with strategy. Every company, department, and team needs a strategy to align themselves to. Make sure you have a clear team or product strategy that connects upwards with the company’s mission, and share it with the team.
- Define your roadmap. A team or product roadmap is a great way to connect your strategy with the tactics and day-to-day tasks. Create a roadmap for the year, or two years, ahead, clearly showing the journey you will go on and how everyone will contribute.
Craft your leadership style to suit your team
When employees are struggling, it’s often because they don’t see eye-to-eye with their manager, not that they hate their job. To help you build a strong connection, take some time to craft your leadership style to suit your team, enabling you to help them reach their potential and reduce the chance of loafing.
- Balance top-down and bottom-up management. Depending on the team, company, or industry, it can be better to take either a directive top-down approach, or employ a more collaborative bottom-up style. Read up on top-down vs. bottom-up leadership to find the style that will work best for you and your team.
- Practice servant leadership. No matter your overarching leadership style, adopting some principles of servant leadership is always a good way to help create a high-performing team. Servant leadership promotes autonomy and collaboration, while actively working to remove blockers for the team.
Use team rituals to bond the groups and celebrate achievements
Teams that have a strong culture and connection are proven to be more effective, engaged, and motivated. A great way to promote this is to instill team rituals designed to boost collaboration, build trust, and celebrate success.
- Identify problems. Rituals start life as problems you want to solve. Get together to identify any problem areas that could be addressed including communication, collaboration, conflict management, work/life balance, or workload.
- Design your rituals. With the issues identified, design a ritual using the trigger, format, outcome format. For this, identify a trigger event (e.g., a conflict occurs), a format for the ritual (e.g., a group discussion), and the desired outcome (e.g., conflict resolved) and start putting it into practice.
Break larger teams into smaller groups or squads
It’s easy to get lost and feel undervalued in a team that’s simply too big. When you’re designing the structure of your team, think about breaking them into smaller subteams, groups, or squads that have a good balance of skills, experience, and responsibility.
- Think about Amazon’s two-pizza rule. While it has supporters and critics, Amazon’s two-pizza team rule is a popular model used by software teams across the globe. Put simply, your teams should be able to be fed by two pizzas. Any larger than that, and you’ll be plagued with confusion, bureaucracy, and additional admin.
- Optimize for the best work style. Another way to form great teams is to focus on the right balance of work styles. This way, you have someone (or multiple people) in each team who is strong in logical tasks, idea creation, analytical detail, and human connection. This gives you the perfect balance of skills while also providing clear roles and responsibilities.
Work with the team to assign the right resources to the right tasks
With the foundations set, it’s time to start allocating work to your team. To get the most out of your team and to avoid social loafing, it’s best to do this collaboratively, ensuring everyone gets a say in what they do and are clear on what you expect.
- Take resource allocation seriously. When allocating resources to tasks, use a proper resource management process to avoid any mistakes further down the line. This is especially important in projects, where resource management goes hand-in-hand with budgeting, risk management, and scope management.
- Break work down into manageable tasks. To help avoid your team becoming overwhelmed, use techniques such as a work breakdown structure, critical path, and task management to make every one granular and easy to understand. This will make it easier to assign tasks and track the team’s progress.
Keep all work in a single unified tool
While we’re on the topic of tracking your team’s progress, a great way to promote trust, transparency, and accountability is to use a project management tool to combine all of your team’s work. Not only does this provide oversight for you, but it helps teams collaborate, share ideas, and offer support when times get tough.
Check out Planio’s project management capabilities. Here are some of the best Planio features to help you create better team connection and avoid social loafing:
- Task management. Create, allocate, and manage tasks across the team, including alerts when things are done or overdue.
- Team chat. Connect, communicate, and stay up to date on the go, to make fast decisions, solve problems, and boost collaboration.
- Time tracking. Ensure team members are focused on the right thing by tracking time spent on tasks, issues, and bugs directly within the platform.
Promote workload balance and psychological safety
Once you’re in a good place, you can get ahead of social loafing by ensuring teams are inspired, remain balanced, and are in a good headspace. This will avoid any overwork, burnout, or unwanted anxiety that can lead to a loss of motivation and engagement.
- Create an environment of psychological safety. Psychological safety is the belief that you can speak up without the fear of embarrassment or punishment. If your team feels safe, they’re more likely to share when they’re struggling, helping you to intervene before loafing begins.
- Role model a good work-life balance. As a leader, it’s your job to model to your team what a good work-life balance looks like. That means doing things like taking regular breaks, protecting your energy, and not making out-of-hours phone calls.
Use one-on-ones to manage individual performance
While there’s a lot that you can do to avoid loafing in your team, employees must take personal responsibility and ensure they’re delivering what’s expected of them. Use one-on-ones to track individual performance, overcome limiting beliefs, and keep your team members accountable.
- Follow a structured one-on-one format. The best one-on-one meetings have a structured agenda to help managers and employees get the most out of them. Check out our guide to mastering one-on-one meetings to ensure they provide a true performance management checkpoint.
- Use metrics to quantify performance. Managing performance can be a sensitive topic, so use data metrics, such as high-level north star metrics, or low-level agile metrics, to take the emotion out of the conversation and focus on performance.
Embrace making mistakes and learning lessons to help improve
Like all things in project and product management, avoiding social loafing takes time and practice, and you won’t get everything right the first time. Embrace making mistakes and use lessons learned to improve your approach over time.
- Get comfortable making mistakes. Mistakes happen to everyone, no matter how senior or junior you are. As a leader, embrace this and ensure your team is comfortable with how to react when they make a mistake at work.
- Use lessons learned to improve next time. As you and your team better understand social loafing, there will be times you could do something better. Whether you didn’t provide clear direction, failed to spot overwork, or simply used the wrong leadership style, use lessons learned to improve your approach for next time.
Final thoughts: Creating a culture of accountability and trust benefits everyone
Social loafing is the perceived psychological phenomenon that people do less work when they’re in a group setting. But, it turns out employees aren’t inherently lazy, and simply lack the direction, clarity, and accountability to contribute effectively.
A motivated and accountable team achieves more, costs less, and has fun along the way.
Alongside setting clear roles and responsibilities and providing a psychologically safe environment, project management tools such as Planio are great at helping reduce the chances of social loafing.
With features for task management, team chat, time tracking, and collaboration, they give you everything you need to help teams stay organized, connected to the bigger picture, and boost their collective productivity.
Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)
