Social Loafing in Computer-Mediated Communication Context: The Pilot Study

The use of various forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to aid the work of groups has spread quite rapidly and widely. This proposed research intends to examine the relationships between media richness/social presence, task equivocality, and social loafing as well as the influence of social loafing on group decision quality using a laboratory experimental approach. This paper reports the results from the pilot study of the proposed research. The main findings include that (1) CMC participants reported higher perceived loafing than FTF participants did, (2) CMC participants perceived both lower task equivocality and lower task interdependence, and (3) Participants doing the high equivocality task perceived lower feedback immediacy