Evaluation and Performance: A Two-Edged Knife

Social loafing research has shown that participants working together put out less effort than participants working individually (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979), apparently a result of the fact that evaluation is not possible when outputs are pooled (Harkins & Jackson, 1985). On the other hand, research on creativity (e.g., Amabile, 1979), suggests that minimizing the expectation of evaluation facilitates performance. In the present study, treatment conditions typically used in social loafing and creativity research were incorporated in a single design. Participants were asked either to generate as many uses as possible for a common object or to generate uses that were as creative as possible. Participants were also led to believe either that their outputs could be evaluated or that their outputs would be pooled with those of others. The performance of participants given number instructions was facilitated by the prospect of evaluation. However, when asked to be creative, participants whose outputs were pooled performed better than participants whose outputs could be evaluated. These data suggest that on tasks that require creativity, conditions that are thought to lead to "loafing" can have the opposite effect.