Social loafing and identifiability: the mediating role of achievement goal orientations.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if differences in the tendency to exhibit social loafing is a function of achievement-goal orientation and identifiability. Ninety-six males drawn from 10th-grade physical education classes responded to the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire (Duda, 1992) prior to completing a 30-meter sprint task under three separate conditions: as an individual, in a team with individual performance identified, and in a team with individual performance not identified. Following a median split of the task and ego values reported, subjects were divided into high and low groups for both orientations. Sprint times were compared by means of a 2 x 2 x 3 ANOVA (task x ego x sprint condition) with repeated measures on the third factor. Findings revealed that individuals with a combined low task/high ego orientation were significantly slower in the nonidentifiable team condition than in the other two conditions, whereas high-task/low-ego-oriented individuals demonstrated consistent performance across all three conditions. While confirming that identifiability of performance is an important situational variable, the findings suggest that the dispositional factor of achievement orientation may interact to provide a more detailed explanation of the social loafing phenomenon.