Protestant Work Ethic Moderates Social Loafing

Prior research on social loafing has emphasized situational factors and has largely neglected personality influences. The current study attempted to close this gap by exploring the potential for Protestant work ethic (PWE) to reduce or eliminate social loafing. Individuals who had been pretested on PWE were asked to work either coactively or collectively on an idea generation task. As predicted, PWE moderated the effects of work condition on individual effort such that PWE scores were negatively associated with social loafing. These results highlight the potential importance of personality influences on group motivation and suggest that individuals with a strong personal work ethic are unlikely to engage in social loafing. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.