Answering a very good question by Sebastian Svensson on parasitism:
What about the effect of parasitism and letting others do the heavy work if you completely eliminate individual measurement? Intuitively, it seems like there must be two extremes - hyper-individuality that causes competition, and hyper-collectivism that causes people to slack and let one or two hard workers do everything until they too eventually lose motivation - with a sweet spot somewhere in between. Have you observed any such effects, when eg exploring different factors such as short term vs long term, and different ways of expressing individual vs collective KPIs? The reason I’m asking is that I’ve seen teams fail both due to hyper individualism and due to hyper collectivism and I’d expect both effects to show up in experiments, given the right conditions. If so, are there findings in what those factors may be?
I believe that by “parasitism”, you are referring to laziness and slacking — where some individuals may choose not to work, relying on others to “cover for them”.
Teams and groups are fundamentally different: in teams, individuals collaborate because they internalize the common shared goal, making it their own. In groups, people collaborate when they perceive that the common goal aligns with their own personal goals.
This distinction is well-studied in organizational psychology and is a key reason why teams are typically much more effective than groups.
In teams, members trust each other, sometimes even with their lives. They share responsibilities genuinely and also hold each other accountable and control each other. Historically, in hunter-gatherer societies, teams would ostracize individuals deemed parasitic or unproductive. Being outcast often led to death, as surviving alone was nearly impossible. Thus, the consequences of parasitism were severe.
However, such extreme measures were very rare. Humans are inherently social creatures, and there is even a hypothesis that our brains evolved significantly to enhance our capacity for socialization, which is essential for teamwork. This suggests that humans are naturally inclined toward effective teamwork.
Despite this, we do observe people slacking in work environments. I would argue that this behavior is primarily due to systemic issues within the organization (see my article 1, article 2, article 3).
One significant factor is the presence of “external individual measurement”. By “external”, I mean evaluations conducted by someone outside the team, such as a manager.
Counterintuitively, once individual impact within a team is measured by an external party, it can begin to erode the team’s cohesion, turning it into a group. This undermines the internalization of the shared goal, diminishes trust among team members, and negatively affects their interactions.
There is simply no room for competition between team members in a true team. Competition undermines collaboration by disrupting the internalization of the shared goal, which is essential for effective teamwork.
I’d suggest that if you observe slacking or parasitism within the group, start by checking the systemic factors. You may need to remove some obstacles to help the group become a team, allowing people to internalize the shared goal and become more productive.
Additionally, what you perceive as slacking might not be parasitism, but something positive. For example, if you’re measuring how many features each developer builds and notice that one person is doing less, it might be because they are helping others or contributing in other valuable ways. Measurements can often blind us to this.
Only if you’re certain, and even better if the team is certain, that the person is displaying parasitic behavior should it be considered as such. In my 23 years of experience, I’ve seen it happen only once.