When I explain the numerous negative effects of individual performance reviews on product quality and team performance, I often hear managers say, “But we need it to reduce the risk of social loafing”.
However, social loafing is a symptom of a set of systemic issues that deform the team, and individual performance review, instead of improving the situation, will only worsen the overall problem.
According to various studies [1][2][3][4], the main reasons for the social loafing effect are:
So, it turns out that people suddenly get bored and lose interest if teams are made unnecessarily large, and when user problems are broken down by “bosses” (PMs and team leads) and handed out as individual tasks.
Who would have thought, right?
In this original experiment that Ringelmann performed in 1913, people simply didn’t see the value in the work they were doing. They didn’t feel that they needed another person on the team to “kill the mammoth”; they didn’t have a common, shared goal, and they weren’t autonomous enough to reach that goal together. They weren’t even a team.
There are many ways in which managers prevent groups from becoming teams or diminish already efficient teams into mere groups [5][6][7], and individual performance reviews are one of the main ways.
So, whenever you, the manager, think that you have social loafing on the team, ask yourself why—what have you done to the team? And certainly think twice before damaging the team even more with individual performance reviews.