Reducing Social Loafing Assume the role of a manager of a home improvements/buil

Question

Reducing Social Loafing

Assume the role of a manager of a home improvements/building supply store that sells a wide range of products—including lumber, plumbing xtures, windows, and paint—to both commercial accounts and individual customers. The store is staffed by three types of employees who work in three different groups: (1) a group of six cashiers who check out purchases made by individuals on site; (2) a group of ve oor employees who help customers locate items they need, stock merchandise, and reshelve returns; and (3) a group of four employees who handle commercial accounts. All the employees are paid on an hourly basis. The cashiers and oor employees earn the minimum wage; the commercial account employees earn one and a half times the minimum wage. You are pleased with the performance of the cashiers and the commercial account employees. The oor employees, however, seem to be putting forth less effort than they should. On several occasions, customers have complained about not being able to nd items, and you personally have located the items for them even though there were ample oor employees on duty. The oor employees do not seem busy, and their workloads have not increased recently, yet they have a backlog of work to be done, including stocking of new merchandise and reshelving. Despite their backlog, you often see members of this group chatting with each other, taking cigarette breaks outside the back of the store, and making personal telephone calls—all outside their regularly scheduled breaks.

Question:

List 3 – 4 recommendations to reduce social loang in the group of oor employees. (Refer to the ways to reduce social loafing as discussed in the chapter)

Explanation / Answer

Social loafing refers to the situation when a particular group or bunch of people try to evade the work responsibility conferred on them and engage in all the non-productive or personal activities. The biggest advantage, which comes in their favour is the large no. working population, so that probable loafers can hide and would be hard to detect unless one puts up extra efforts to nail them out. In this case, no. of floor employees are not much and still, they were found to be involved in unproductive activities thereby creating a huge backlog of deliverables. Some of the recommendations which could be given to reduce the social loafing, in this case, would be, such as-

1. The very first step is to know the primary cause of such type of tendencies adopted by the flor workers. There might be some prevailing discontent among such team members and could be resolved through proper dialogue.

2. The second approach could be to make them aware of their work responsibilities and work ethics so that they may acknowledge the same and could start taking their tasks more seriously.

3. Making a strong performance management system for all the employees would make some positive difference among social loafers and would make them more accountable for their work. Also, performance management system would ensure that hard workers or performers are rewarded for their work and results.

4. The other significant approach would be to divide the four-member team into the two-member unit and allotting them a different set of work at different work locations.

5. Introducing some interesting group task thereby glorifying the essence of group work and work discipline could also change the mindset of such individuals.

Hence, there could be multiple approaches to resolve such type of issues, but which recommendations would work out the best, solely depends on the case to case basis and also the nature of the individuals.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse R
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.