Since last, prehistoric individuals used the most powerful tool that the human ever made;the

group. With the sum up of different forces, humans have been able to reach and create unbelievable
things. From small societies till huge empires, groups have been the main strategy to deal with any
kind of problems;wars, projects, festivities...Due to all these kind of relations, social Psychology
appears. It began in the United States at the dawn of the 20th century but consolidate foundations
were developed in 18th century and those in the emerging field of social psychology were
concerned with developing concrete explanations for different aspects of human nature. Big names
at this time were Norman Triplett, Kurt Lewin or Stanley Milgram. Among those, one of them was
Max Ringelmann's, the first researcher in study the social loafing effect, one of the main axis of this
research.
This effect can be simply define as the phenomenon of people exerting less effort to achieve a goal
when they work in a group than when they work alone. It must be differentiated from others no
related problems like coordination or individual differences. Social loafing effect has been
demonstrated in several experiments like Rope-pulling experiments(Max Ringelmann 1913)
where he had people pulling on a rope, and compared the maximum they could have pulled,
based on individual test, to how much each person actually pulled. Originals results are show in

the table 1.

Over 50 years later, Bibb Latan asked participants to judge cheering and applause, and also to
judge how loud these seem to those who hear them. The participants were asked to:
1 Clap or cheer as loudly as possible for 5 seconds

2Judge the noises. Both performers and observers were asked to guess how much noise had
been produced.
Results also confirmed the existence of social loafing effect. The noise produced did not grow in
proportion to the number of people. The average sound pressure generated per person decreased
with increasing group size (p<0.001).
About the causes of this effect, it is possible to find many different studies that always agree with
the same 6 ones:
Diffusion of responsibility/Evaluation potential:as the number of people grows in a group, the
deindividuation effect becomes stronger causing a decrease of personal accountability and
dissociation from individual achievement. The combination of both can lead in lower efforts of
individual when they are in collaborative environments.

Motivation :individuals who are more motivated are more likely to engage in social facilitation
(that is, to increase ones efforts when in the presence of others) whereas those who are less
motivated are more likely to engage in social loafing.

Dispensability of effort:as the size of the group increases, the idea of underestimation the
contribution of own effort increases. This leads people not to contribute as much as they could.

"Sucker" effect/Aversion: people tend to think when they are working in a group that the rest is
avoiding all the responsibilities creating a overload of work in the individual. As the people dont
want to be the "sucker," ,they wait to see how much effort others will put into a group before do
nothing

Matching of effort: if people believes that some members of the group will slack, he will slack.
According to Jackson and Harkins (1985) , this is done in order to match the efforts of the rest.

Sub-maximal goal setting: By setting a goal that is based on maximization, people may feel that
there is a set level that the group needs to be achieved. Because of this, they feel that they can work
less hard for the overall desired effect.
The other big axis of this research is about perception, the one of optimal performance in a group.
In the essence of that word, it is included the term subjectivity since it is impossible to find to
perceptions with the same characteristics between each other so, the optimal performance concept
itself is something that requires further researches in other to create some objectivity . Todays
world is focuses on reaching this concept due to the obvious implications. Consequently enterprises
are always looking for the optimization and it is a fact that,4 more and more organizations are using
teams or groups of employees to accomplish goals. Inevitably, one might ask if team performance
can be reasonably appraised,and if so,how can be sure that this appraisal will be and objective one?
Fortunately, we are not looking for a objective method to evaluate the grade of optimization
in a group. The main objective of this research was to explain how once the perception of optimal
performance in a group is created inside the individual, how it can lead in an unconsciousness social
loafing effect. On the other hand and because the nature of the method, we collected the perception
cues that generate on the individual, the believe of optimal performance. These data can be used in
further investigations for creating objective models that allow to evaluate the optimal performance
in a more objective way.