SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CULTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS

Chapter 17

Sub-chapter: Culture, Motivation, and Productivity

SUBJECT: CROSS CULTURE PSYCHOLOGY

DOSEN: Prof. Dr. Hj. Kusdwiratri Setiono

Dra. Tutty I. Sodjakusumah, M.Sc, M.Litt

By;
MUWAGA MUSA
NPM: 190220093001
PROGRAM MAGISTER PSIKOLOGI SOCIAL

FACULTY OF PSYCHOLOGY

BANDUNG 2011
Background
Many people spend portion of their lives in organizations like educational systems.
Organizations play an important part in many people’s lives and are an important agent of
socialization in the development and maintenance of culture. In the past, it was probably easier
than it is now to study organizations in relative isolation from issues of culture. Previously, the
American workforce was less racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse than it is today. With
less cultural diversity, the expectations of the members of any work organization were generally
similar. The workplace includes unprecedented numbers of multinational and international
corporations—work organizations that have subsidiaries, satellite offices, and work units in
more than one country. These companies need to deal increasingly with people of diverse and
varied backgrounds. Today, transfers from one business unit to another within the same company
can mean a transfer from one country to another. Clearly, this internationalization of business
brings with it more intercultural issues and challenges.
Advances in communication and transportation allow companies and individuals to work more
easily today than ever before over vast physical and cultural distances. Technological changes in
communication—telephones, facsimile machines, video teleconferencing, and electronic mail—
have forced the issue of culture to the forefront of our work lives. The business world has
become a global village, in which the exchange of goods, services, and resources knows few
boundaries. This global village raises issues within our borders as well as across borders. Many
of these issues are cultural.
Our ability to deal with these issues in an ever-changing business world will determine our
success or failure.

Culture, Motivation, and Productivity

One important issue all companies, work organizations, and businesses must address is the
degree to which their employees will be productive in various types of work settings. All
companies want to maximize productivity while minimizing personnel costs and the expenditure
of other resources, thereby ensuring the greatest profit margins. This concern has led to an
important area of research on productivity as a function of group size. Early research on group
productivity in the United States typically showed that individual productivity tends to decline in
larger groups the term is social loafing.

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Two factors contribute to this phenomenon. One is reduced efficiency resulting from a lack of
coordination among workers’ efforts, resulting in lack of activity or duplicate activity. The
second factor is a reduction in effort by individuals when they work in groups as compared to
when they work by themselves. Latané (1981) and his colleagues (Latané et al., 1979) conducted
a number of studies investigating group size, coordination, and effort.
They found that in larger groups, both lack of coordination and reduced effort resulted in
decreased productivity. Latané (1981) attributed these findings to a diffusion of responsibility in
groups. As group size increases, the responsibility for getting a job done is divided among more
people, and group members ease up because their individual contribution is less recognizable.
Early cross-cultural research on groups and their productivity, however, found exactly the
opposite phenomenon in other cultures. Earley (1989) examined social loafing in an
organizational setting among managerial trainees in the United States and in the People’s
Republic of China. Subjects in both cultures worked on a task under conditions of low or high
accountability and low or high shared responsibility. The results clearly indicated social loafing
for the American subjects, whose individual performances in a group were less than when
working alone, but not for the Chinese. In other studies involving Japanese participants in several
tasks, it was found that not only did social loafing not occur, but exactly the opposite occurred.
Working in a group enhanced individual performance rather than diminished it. Several authors
have speculated as to why social striving is observed in other cultures.
These explanations center on the culture’s degree of collectivism or group orientation. Cultures
that are more collectivistic (such as China and Japan) foster interpersonal interdependence and
group collective functioning more than does the individualistic American culture. Groups tend to
be more productive in these cultures precisely because they foster coordination among in-group
members. These cultures also place higher values on individual contributions in group settings.
Interestingly, this trend may also be occurring in the United States, at least partially as a result of
the influence of Asian, especially Japanese, business practices that focus on teamwork,
cooperation, and quality. As a result of studying successful business practices overseas, many
American companies have tried to adapt and adopt some of these practices, including increasing
teamwork, in their daily work behaviors. Indeed, several studies involving American participants
have begun to challenge the traditional notion of social loafing. Jackson and Williams (1985), for
instance, reported that Americans working collectively improved performance and productivity.

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Further analyses indicated that although Japanese had higher productivity than American in
general (regardless of social context); there was no difference in the quality of the work. Thus,
the notions of social loafing and group productivity are now being challenged not only cross-
culturally but also within individualistic culture.
In another research, the results indicated that individualists who felt independent and less reliant
were less apt to engage in cooperative behavior, whereas collectivists who felt interdependent
and reliant on groups were more likely to behave cooperatively. These findings suggest that there
may be a relationship between individualistic cooperation and social loafing, but that the same
relationship cannot explain cooperation in collectivists.
Finally, as more recent research has uncovered social striving effects among work groups with
American participants, an increasing number of scientists are examining the mechanisms
underlying such social striving in an individualistic culture. Some scholars have suggested that
one way in which work groups and teams can become more productive in an individualistic
culture is through the use of constructive thought patterns that help to transform self managing
teams into self-leading teams. The idea is that employees become empowered to influence
strategic issues concerning what they do and why, in addition to how they do their work. Again,
these suggestions highlight the notion that different bases may underlie productivity or
nonproductively in different cultural groups. A central question revolves around the best
combination of ingredients (such as group size, nature of the individuals, nature of the tasks) to
maximize social striving among all participants and to minimize social loafing. Recent economic
necessities have forced many companies and organizations to spend less on personnel, resulting
in “downsizing” or, more recently, “rightsizing.” With fewer people doing more work, people in
successful business organizations have been forced to reevaluate and redefine their own
identities within their work groups in a more collectivistic way, for the success of the business
unit and their own survival.
The research conducted to date suggests that groups from all types of cultures may experience
social striving or social loafing. Which outcome occurs depends on a host of factors, including
group size, identifiability, shared responsibility, and culture. Exactly which factors influence
which outcomes in what ways is not yet clear. The picture that emerges so far is that the specific
ingredients that result in striving or loafing are different in different cultures.

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Criticisms
The research that discovered that productivity of employees tends to decline if the number is
bigger. However, big is relative there is need to make it clear. Because

Conclusion
The cultural differences that people bring with them to the workplace, both internationally and
domestically, present us with challenges unprecedented in the modern industrialized period of
history. To meet these challenges, business, government, and private organizations look to
research and education about cultural diversity as it relates to work. Intercultural communication
and competence training and business consulting with regard to managing diversity have become
major growth industries. Confronting the challenges of diversity in the future, there is need to
move away from the notion of managing a nuisance variable to viewing it as a potential resource
for tapping into products, services, and activities that will make companies more efficient,
productive, and profitable than ever before. By tapping into diversity rather than managing it,
perhaps there is to increase international and intercultural cooperation not only in business but
among people in general.

END