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Journal of Business Ethics (2019) 160:713–727 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3933-z

ORIGINAL PAPER

Reaping the Fruits of Another’s Labor: The Role of Moral Meaningfulness, Mindfulness, and Motivation in Social Loafing

Katarina Katja Mihelič1 · Barbara Culiberg1

Received: 30 August 2017 / Accepted: 28 May 2018 / Published online: 5 June 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract Despite the popularity of teams in universities and modern organizations, they are often held back by dishonest actions, social loafing being one of them. Social loafers hide in the crowd and contribute less to the pooled effort of a team, which leads to an unfair division of work. While previous studies have mostly delved into the factors related to the task or the group in an attempt to explain social loafing, this study will instead focus on individual factors. Accordingly, the aim is to investigate the determinants of social loafing attitudes, namely moral meaningfulness and mindfulness in a university setting. We further examine the relationship between attitudes and intentions and introduce the moderating role of motivation in the attitude– intention link. The findings from a sample of 319 business students reveal that both mindfulness and moral meaningfulness are negatively related to loafing attitudes, while attitudes positively predict social loafing intentions. In addition, we find that extrinsic motivation strengthens the relationship between social loafing attitudes and intentions.

Keywords Academic misconduct · Moral meaningfulness · Mindfulness · Motivation · Social loafing · University

Introduction

Working in teams has become a common feature of contem‑ porary working lives (Kozlowski and Bell 2013; Schlossberg 2016). It is therefore not surprising that in higher educa‑ tion institutions team/group projects have gained traction in “preparing students for the real world” (Forehand et al. 2016, p. 62) as they mirror the experiences of the modern workplace. However, while teamwork is popular in univer‑ sities and businesses alike, it is not immune to individual dishonest behavior such as social loafing which occurs when individuals expend less work effort when they form part of a group than they do when working individually (George 1992; Kidwell and Bennett 1993; Latané et al. 1979). Draw‑ ing on assertions by Bennett and Naumann (2005), social loafing is problematic for two main reasons: (1) an indi‑ vidual is not delivering what is expected of him/her; and (2) when observed by others, incidences of slacking off may

decrease motivation and trigger a negative performance spiral among peers. The negative effects of social loafing manifest in teams and organizations as diminished cohe‑ siveness, hindered work processes, greater dissatisfaction with results (Monzani et al. 2014), lower potency (Duffy and Shaw 2000) and reduced motivation of other members (Price et al. 2006). This all diminishes a team’s productivity and efficiency (Comer 1995; Karau and Williams 1995; Bennett and Naumann 2005). Because it results in adverse conse‑ quences for individuals and societies, it has been dubbed a “social disease” (Latané et al. 1979, p. 831). In line with this reasoning, social loafing is a moral issue since it is a choice that “involves modifying the life plan of another individual or group of individuals” (Morris 2004, p. 353).

Understanding what drives social loafing is relevant nowadays for educators teaching ethics in business schools and managers who encourage and advocate teamwork. Social loafing can be addressed through ethics educa‑ tion and development at university, in order to potentially repress this questionable practice early on and discourage its occurrence in future employment. It has been suggested that the relationship between ethics instruction and ethi‑ cal perception and behavior is affected by an individual’s personal characteristics (Wang and Calvano 2015). As is evident from recent research (May and Luth 2013; Floyd

* Barbara Culiberg [email protected]‑lj.si

Katarina Katja Mihelič [email protected]‑lj.si

1 Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva pl. 17, Ljubljana, Slovenia

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et al. 2013; Wang and Calvano 2015), the diverse effects of business ethics education have the makings of a viable set of predictors for explaining ethically questionable situations, including social loafing. For example, moral meaningfulness was initially approached as an outcome of business ethics education (May and Luth 2013), but has the potential to serve as an antecedent in social loafing decision‑making since it describes the relative importance of ethics in an individual’s life. Lampe and Engleman‑Lampe (2012, p. 99) also emphasized the role of mindfulness, conceptualized as present‑centered attention and awareness (Brown and Ryan 2003), by stressing “a growing need to educate students about how the mind works in ways that can help or hinder making ethical decisions.” Moreover, when Ballantine et al. (2016) recently demonstrated that students’ ethical decisions are a result of their learning approaches (which incorporate their motivation), business ethics educators were alerted to the complex role of student motivation in academic miscon‑ duct. Motivation, referring to a set of energetic forces that initiate, direct, and sustain action (Pinder 2008), may not only serve as a predictor, as studies of academic misconduct (Davy et al. 2007) suggest, but also as a moderator, as shown in studies of job‑related intentions and performance (Dysvik and Kuvaas 2010, 2011). Following these recent research developments, the objective of this study is to examine (a) moral meaningfulness and mindfulness as novel antecedents of social loafing attitudes; and (b) motivation as a modera‑ tor in the social loafing attitudes–intentions relationship. By introducing these constructs to the domain of social loafing, this paper strives to link the literature on business ethics education with ethically questionable behaviors.

Because social loafing takes place in various settings, such as at work and at university, separate research streams have developed to examine this issue. Accordingly, organi‑ zational scholars have studied employees’ social loafing in an effort to better understand what causes a team’s subop‑ timal performance (e.g., Meyer et al. 2016; Kidwell and Valentine 2009). In addition, considerable attention has also been devoted to this topic in the higher education setting (e.g., Jassawalla et al. 2009; Schippers 2014) by treating it as a form of academic misconduct. Throughout the years, the efforts of both research streams have sought to understand the conditions that give rise to social loafing tendencies. To this end, studies have largely focused on factors that describe either the task or the team charac‑ teristics and its relationships, i.e., among team members or with team leaders (e.g., Meyer et al. 2016; Murphy et al. 2003; Kidwell and Valentine 2009). Considerably less attention has been devoted to understanding how the characteristics of an individual team member impact their decision to withhold effort. Conversely, a recent meta‑ review of ethical decision‑making studies in business pointed out that individual factors have been extensively

studied in business ethics literature and there is a trend towards identifying new individual factors which could work as antecedents or moderators in the decision‑making process (Lehnert et al. 2015). In this regard, it is important to consider the findings of Hoon and Tan (2008) where one individual factor, i.e., conscientiousness, significantly predicted the occurrence of social loafing, while group and task characteristics did not. Social loafing research in higher education has lately further attested to the relevance of other individual factors (e.g., Schippers 2014), thus sowing the seeds for further scholarly investigations. In light of the apparent relevance and potential of novel indi‑ vidual factors and their underrepresentation in previous social loafing studies, this study will focus on social loaf‑ ing as a type of academic misconduct and complement this thinking with research from the business ethics research stream, its rich background and the more recent develop‑ ments therein. Hence, this study adopts an intra‑individual lens while examining this phenomenon by focusing on the “bad apples” (Kish‑Gephart et al. 2010), i.e., the individu‑ als, their characteristics, and their decision‑making.

The study aims to make the following unique contribu‑ tions to the literature. First, considering social loafing is a moral issue, we contribute to the literature on academic mis‑ conduct by proposing two promising constructs with ethical ties as antecedents to social loafing attitudes. In this way, we answer a recent call (Cronan et al. 2015) to identify the determinants of attitudes in studies of academic integrity violations. We thus introduce mindfulness, which has been advocated as an important decision‑making determinant in ethical situations (Ruedy and Schweitzer 2010; Schuh et al. 2017) and also holds the potential to predict social loafing attitudes. In addition, recent recommendations highlighting the need to explore how mindfulness influences ethical con‑ duct in concert with other individual‑level characteristics (Schuh et al. 2017) are followed. Hence, moral meaning‑ fulness is introduced in order to explain social loafing by looking into the way ethics is considered in students’ daily lives at university.

Second, considering the important role of motivation found in previous studies of academic misconduct (e.g., Davy et al. 2007; Jordan et al. 2013; Rettinger et al. 2004), it seems likely that the effects of attitudes on the intentions of social loafing may differ depending on the level of student motivation. Therefore, this study contributes to this line of research and provides a more nuanced understanding of the attitude–intention link by introducing extrinsic motivation as a moderator, which takes account of the fact that the fun‑ damental underpinnings of social loafing are motivational (George 1992; Shepperd 1993). The inclusion of extrinsic motivation also responds to the appeal by Smith et al. (2001) to identify other individual variables as moderators of social loafing effects.

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Third, an incremental contribution refers to the position‑ ing of social loafing in academic misconduct research, which has mostly focused on cheating and plagiarism (Bing et al. 2012; McCabe et al. 2006; Cronan et al. 2015; Lawson 2004; Ballantine et al. 2016; Fida et al. 2016), while giving consid‑ erably less attention to other practices. Therefore, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of social loafing as a dishonest student act. According to research‑ ers, this phenomenon has surprisingly been neglected (Jas‑ sawalla et al. 2009) even though students express concerns about social loafing and its consequences such as the quality of the work that is submitted and lower grades (Clark and Baker 2011).

The remainder of the paper offers an overview of the social loafing phenomenon and its characteristics, followed by a review of the empirical studies that investigated loafing determinants in the educational and organizational settings. Thereafter, a conceptual model of social loafing intentions among business students is proposed and argumentation for the proposed hypotheses is developed. The empirical study’s research design is then described and the results of hypoth‑ eses testing are provided. The "Discussion" section offers an interpretation of the findings through the lens of academic misconduct and business ethics education and outlines prac‑ tical suggestions for reducing the incidence of loafing at uni‑ versity. The paper concludes with limitations and suggests opportunities for future scholarly exploration of the social loafing phenomenon.

Theoretical Background

Origins of the Term and Conceptualization

In the early 1880s, a professor of agricultural engineering Max Ringelmann designed a rope‑pulling task for his stu‑ dents and measured their performance. What he observed was a worse performance when the number of students pull‑ ing the rope increased. In other terms, when working with their peers students were more likely to slack off, which dec‑ ades later came to be known as the Ringelmann effect (Krav‑ itz and Martin 1986). It was not until the late 1970s that this pioneering study was replicated in a series of experiments demonstrating that students who performed alone clapped their hands and shouted more intensely than those who did the same thing as part of a group. The presence of other people led them to reduce their effort in clapping and cheer‑ ing (Latané et al. 1979; Williams et al. 1981). It was then that Latané and colleagues coined the term social loafing.1

When social loafing occurs at university, it is a form of academic misconduct because it creates an unfair academic advantage for an individual or an unfair academic disadvan‑ tage for other members of the academic community (Uni‑ versity of California). The problem of social loafing is that students hide in the crowd and contribute less to the pooled effort of a team, particularly in situations where the potential for evaluation is low (Hoon and Tan 2008). As a result, pro‑ fessors obtain a false representation of an individual student’s (i.e., loafer’s) efforts, while other members of the team need to compensate for the resulting slack so they obtain better results. After having experienced loafing by team members, students may form a negative attitude towards teamwork which may manifest itself in the form of a reluctance to work in teams even later on in future employment.

Teamwork at university enables interpersonal interactions while simultaneously fostering adaptability and tolerance. However, those students who have had negative experiences with teamwork mostly associate it with “frustration” (Hall and Buzwell 2012, p. 7). The main source of this frustration is often the problem of social loafing, and as a result students complain about the team members’ unequal contributions. Jassawalla and colleagues found that students perceive loaf‑ ers as those that (a) do less and slack off, (b) do poor quality work for the team, and (c) engage in distractive and disrup‑ tive behaviors (Jassawalla et al. 2009). Students therefore turn to lecturers to report how certain team members spend minimal amounts of time and effort while at the same time expecting to be rewarded equally, which seems unfair to those who do their fair share of the work (Hall and Buzwell 2012; Jassawalla et al. 2009; Clark and Baker 2011). Indeed, a loafer profits from being a member of groups where the successful completion of a project leads to equal rewards for all members (Comer 1995). In situations where the individ‑ ual contributions are difficult to evaluate, it is relatively easy for a loafer to evade his/her job or task (Karau and Williams 1993; Price et al. 2006; Williams et al. 1981).

Determinants of Social Loafing

Social loafing is widespread and can be found in both the organizational as well as educational setting, across gender and age and in various occupations and different cultures

1 In day‑to‑day discussions we often hear the term “free riding” when describing someone slacking off on team assignments. Social loafing and free riding are similar in that they both entail effort being withheld, i.e., investing less than full effort when performing a task (Bennett and

Naumann 2005; Kidwell and Bennett 1993). Loafers put in less effort when working in a group compared to the effort they devote when work‑ ing individually due to reduced identifiability or evaluation (Latané et al. 1979; Kidwell and Bennett 1993). Free riders enjoy the benefits of belonging to a group while they are simultaneously unburdened by the equivalent costs of providing those benefits. The decision to free ride resides in comparing the benefits of contributing to a group’s goals and the benefits obtained by free riding (Albanese and Van Fleet 1985).

Footnote 1 (continued)

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(Karau and Williams 1993). This makes it of interest to researchers studying academic and workplace misconduct. Therefore, this section offers an overview of the main deter‑ minants that have previously been investigated in relation to social loafing.

In terms of the team and task characteristics associated with loafing, field studies among employees have established that group size and a lack of cohesiveness (Liden et al. 2004) exacerbate loafing, whereas team identification and a posi‑ tive group context (Kidwell and Valentine 2009; Høigaard et al. 2013) reduce it. A study conducted among lower‑level employees from an electronics firm and a machinery pro‑ ducing firm demonstrated that higher task interdependence, lower task visibility and lower distributive justice predicted social loafing (Liden et al. 2004). In the educational setting, social loafing was more prevalent in larger groups and was present in situations where the task/project was greater in scope and more comprehensive, thus carrying a considerable weight in the overall grade (Aggarwal and O’Brien 2008).

As far as interpersonal exchanges are concerned, exist‑ ing evidence reveals that a higher quality of leader‑member exchange decreased social loafing among manufacturing employees (Murphy et al. 2003). Further, analyzing teams of blue‑collar workers in German companies, Meyer and col‑ leagues (2016) found that social loafing was most prevalent in teams with strong homogeneous subgroups within the team (i.e., strong faultlines). A study involving students working on an idea‑generation task demonstrated that students with high and average levels of interpersonal trust engaged in social loafing (Williams and Karau 1991). Scholars have also explored one’s perceptions and attributions of peers’ loafing. Australian students, for example, attributed loafing to peers’ apathy and laziness (Hall and Buzwell 2012). Similarly, Jasa‑ walla et al. (2009) inquired about students’ perceptions of their peers’ loafing and found that students attributed loaf‑ ers’ slacking off to apathy and their disruptive behavior to social disconnectedness. The way individuals perceive the loafing of others also affects their own behavior. In particu‑ lar, empirical studies demonstrate that perceiving that other members loaf, or even anticipating that other members will loaf, increases the incidence of loafing (Karau and Williams 1993; Jackson and Harkins 1985). Contrary to these find‑ ings from the workplace, a study involving students found that perceptions of peers’ loafing reduced one’s own loafing (Jassawalla et al. 2009), i.e., social compensation.

Next, we turn to the individual variables that drive social loafing. Existing organizational studies have found that indi‑ vidual job satisfaction has a negative effect on social loafing among military reserve personnel (Kidwell and Valentine 2009). Similarly, satisfaction with the management of a company negatively predicted loafing among hotel employ‑ ees in China, turnover intentions contributed to more social loafing, while affective organizational commitment was not

significantly associated with loafing (Luo et al. 2013). In an academic setting, students with a low need for cognition loafed more on a vigilance task (i.e., paying attention to dots appearing on a computer screen), confirming the need for cognition as a moderator (Smith et al. 2001). Authors of two studies involving undergraduate students incorporated personality characteristics in their research and found that conscientiousness had a significant negative effect on loaf‑ ing (Hoon and Tan 2008; Ferrari and Pychyl 2012). More recently, Schippers (2014) revealed that conscientiousness as well as agreeableness do indeed compensate for loafing tendencies among Dutch undergraduate students and thereby affect a team’s overall performance less. Further, Duffy and Shaw (2000) report that the presence of envy enhances loaf‑ ing, while a student’s felt responsibility contributes to less slacking (Hoon and Tan 2008). Negative affectivity does not have a significant influence on social loafing (Murphy et al. 2003). The range of factors explored in social loafing studies is wide, but there is a deficit of individual factors with stronger ethical ties. In the following section, we fill this void by developing a conceptual model that explains an individual student’s loafing intention.

Conceptual Model and Hypotheses

This study draws on insights from early theoretical frame‑ works of social loafing (Comer 1995; Kidwell and Bennett 1993) and recent additions to social loafing theory, which pointed to the explanatory power of individual factors (Schippers 2014; Jassawalla et al. 2009) by focusing on the drivers of social loafing through an intra‑individual view. In the model, the proposed constructs are linked to the atti‑ tude–intention relationship of social loafing which stems from the basic proposition that attitudes shape intentions, which in turn lead to behavior (Bentler and Speckart 1979; Ajzen 1991). Attitudes are conceptualized as one’s disposi‑ tion to respond favorably or unfavorably to social loafing, while intentions indicate how much of an effort people plan to exert in order to loaf (Ajzen 2002).

To explain how students form their attitudes towards social loafing, we propose a pair of constructs that describe how students approach tasks (i.e., mindfulness) and ethics (i.e., moral meaningfulness) in their daily lives. While their handling of tasks helps determine the role of their state of mind in this situation, the role ethics plays in students’ lives is important because they are dealing with a moral issue. By including mindfulness, the psychological state of conscious‑ ness that reflects how present and engrossed students are when they perform required tasks, student involvement in team tasks is taken into account. Mindfulness may help indi‑ viduals withdraw from automatic thoughts and unhealthy behavior (Brown and Ryan 2003). More specifically, being

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aware of what is going on during teamwork leads students to refrain from automatically performing their tasks and to also pay attention to their peers’ engagement in tasks. We further focus on the role ethics plays in student life to account for the fact that social loafing may be viewed as a moral issue (Mor‑ ris 2004) since students may benefit at the expense of others. Given that social loafing holds negative consequences for other team members, we include moral meaningfulness to complement mindfulness as an antecedent of social loafing attitudes and account for its moral aspects.

Based on existing theorizing on the role of motivation in teams (Shepperd 1993) and following Comer’s propo‑ sitions (1995), we introduce motivation as a moderator in the attitude–intention relationship. In this way, we strive to capture student engagement in their studies as this repre‑ sents the context in which social loafing occurs. Integrating these three different aspects of social loafing from an indi‑ vidual’s perspective allows for a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of the social loafing phenomenon. In what follows, argumentation for each of the hypotheses is provided.

The first hypothesis relies on previous studies on aca‑ demic misconduct that highlight various moral anteced‑ ents of attitudes such as moral obligation (Beck and Ajzen 1991), idealism (Etter et al. 2006), and moral perspective (Eisenberg 2004). Considering these findings and the recent developments in literature on business ethics education (May et al. 2014), we first introduce an antecedent of social loaf‑ ing attitudes that captures how much meaning an individual gains from behaving ethically, namely moral meaningfulness (May et al. 2014). In an educational context, moral meaning‑ fulness reflects the value of ethics in students’ lives and the extent to which ethical actions are integrated into their iden‑ tities (May and Luth 2013). Hanson et al. (2017) denoted how relevant the students’ sense of moral right, practical consequence and moral worth are in their ethical decisions, particularly in the way students determine moral meaning. Following May et al.’s (2014) reasoning, high levels of moral meaningfulness should motivate students to recognize ethical dilemmas, such as social loafing, and resolve them. When students encounter and form their attitudes towards social loafing, they may be influenced by the meaning they have obtained from behaving ethically at university. By hav‑ ing gained meaning from ethical behavior, students may be averse to ethically questionable practices like social loafing since morally oriented students have been shown to hold less favorable attitudes regarding academic misconduct (Eisen‑ berg 2004). In line with this proposition, we believe that a higher level of moral meaningfulness leads to more negative attitudes to social loafing.

Hypothesis 1 Moral meaningfulness is negatively related to social loafing attitudes.

The second hypothesis concerns the relationship between mindfulness and attitudes to social loafing. When an individ‑ ual is in a mindful state, they are alert, aware of the present moment and focus their attention on what is currently going on. In other words, mindful people have greater external awareness and are attentive to daily occurrences (Dane and Brummel 2014). They are also more selfless than mindless individuals (Hunter and McCormick 2008), exhibit a strong orientation to caring for others (Good et al. 2016) and dis‑ play fewer Machiavellian tendencies (Krishnakumar and Robinson 2015). This suggests they are unlikely to delib‑ erately engage in selfish acts such as investing less effort than peers in a team. Because mindfulness increases other‑ oriented and prosocial behaviors (Good et al. 2016), it can be speculated that it leads to the formation of more negative attitudes about withholding effort. In this sense, mindful‑ ness should protect individuals from developing favorable attitudes towards acts that put others at a disadvantage. For the reasons outlined above, we hypothesize:

Hypothesis 2 Mindfulness is negatively related to social loafing attitudes.

A highly recognized relationship in academic miscon‑ duct studies is the link between attitudes and intentions (e.g., Beck and Ajzen 1991; Stone et al. 2009; Harding et al. 2007; Mayhew et al. 2009). It has been suggested that the more favorable an individual’s attitudes to dishonest behavior are, the stronger their intention to perform such behavior (Ajzen 1991). Researchers have well documented that when students have more positive attitudes towards academic mis‑ conduct, their intentions will be more positive (Stone et al. 2009; Lim and See 2001). Although this relationship has not been tested for social loafing, it may also apply here. Students who regard social loafing as something positive are more likely to engage in social loafing. Therefore, we propose that:

Hypothesis 3 Social loafing attitudes are positively related to social loafing intentions.

In addition to the above foci, we sought to further under‑ stand the link between attitudes and intentions. To do so, we turned to Comer’s theorizing since his model of social loafing (Comer 1995) speculated that task motivation may moderate the links between social loafing and the predictive factors. When someone works on a task and is extrinsically motivated, they are focused on attaining an outcome that is separate from performing the task. They chiefly perform the task because it has an instrumental value for them (Ryan and Deci 2000). Several studies lend support for the theo‑ rized role of motivation in intentions. For example, research on ethically questionable consumer behavior has endorsed

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a concept similar to motivation, i.e. involvement, which describes the relevance of an object, situation or action for an individual (Celsi and Olson 1988) as a moderator in the link between attitudes and intention (Kos Koklic et al. 2014). Further, George (1992) previously showed that salespeople’s intrinsic task involvement was predictive of less social loaf‑ ing. It seems plausible then that when a student needs to complete a group assignment and is doing so for extrinsic reasons (e.g., obtaining a grade exclusively in order to pass a course), their attitudes towards social loafing will translate into intentions more strongly than for those students with lower extrinsic motivation levels. We assume that extrinsic motivation would strengthen the relationship between atti‑ tudes and intentions to engage in loafing.

Hypothesis 4 The relationship between social loafing attitudes and intentions is moderated by extrinsic motiva‑ tion: The higher the extrinsic motivation, the stronger the relationship.

Methods

Sample and Procedure

Data were collected from business students in a European business school holding accreditations from three institu‑ tions: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) and the Association for MBAs (AMBA). As part of their courses there, undergraduate students are regularly required to develop group projects during the semester in which they may themselves loaf or encounter their peers’ social loafing. In addition, they often participate in ad hoc team assignments during lectures.

Students were invited to take part in this study at the beginning of seminar sessions of a core undergraduate course. They were informed of the study’s purpose by teach‑ ing assistants, who also instructed them about the research protocol. Then, teaching assistants distributed the paper‑ and‑pencil surveys. Participation in the study was voluntary and students could withdraw at any point during the data collection. Anonymity was guaranteed as no identification information was required.

After initially inspecting the data, 12 questionnaires were removed from the analysis due to substantial missing values and/or a central tendency error. Therefore, the final sample is comprised of 319 usable responses. Altogether, 57% of the study participants were female and 43% were male, with an average age of 19.73 years (SD = 1.13).

Measures

Unless otherwise indicated, the survey items used a five‑ point Likert scale with the anchors: 1‑strongly disagree and 5‑strongly agree. Established and previously validated scales (listed in Table 4 in Appendix) were used to measure the constructs.

Moral Meaningfulness

Four items were used to assess this construct (May et al. 2014) after being adapted to fit a university context (i.e., the item “work” was replaced by the term “school”). A sample item is: “Maintaining high morals/ethics brings me meaning at school.”

Mindfulness

Trait mindfulness was measured with five items from the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) (Brown and Ryan 2003). They form the validated short version scale used in previous studies (Osman et al. 2016; Smith et al. 2017). All items were reverse‑coded in order to evaluate how often an individual experiences mindless states. Response anchors ranged from: 1‑almost never to 5‑almost always. After recoding, higher values indicate an elevated level of trait mindfulness. A sample item is: “I do jobs or tasks auto‑ matically without being aware of what I’m doing.”

Attitudes

This construct was measured using a semantic differential scale (Beck and Ajzen 1991) based on five pairs of adjec‑ tives (e.g., good/bad).

Intentions

Three items were used to measure social loafing inten‑ tions (Chen and Tung 2009). Items were adapted to fit the social loafing context. A sample item is: “In future group projects, I may let my peers carry out some of my tasks/ responsibilities.”

Motivation

The Academic Motivation Scale (Vallerand et al. 1989) was used to measure extrinsic motivation (i.e., four items for extrinsic motivation—external regulation). Participants were asked why they study and then offered statements to respond to. A sample item is: “Because with only a high school degree I would not find a high‑paying job later on.”

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Analytical Procedure

This study used a structural equation modeling procedure to test the hypotheses proposed in the conceptual model. This procedure differs from other multivariate procedures in that it assumes a confirmatory approach to the data analysis and takes account of the measurement error present in social science research because the manifest indicators do not per‑ fectly represent their underlying, latent factor. Aside from this, it considers the strength of the individual relationships with respect to other paths between factors and evaluates a model of relationships as a whole (Byrne 2012).

The effects were estimated using the latent moderated structural equation method, a more recent approach in structural equation modeling that enables the modeling of interactions of latent variables that are measured with con‑ tinuous indicators. The analyses were performed with the M‑Plus program, version 7.4 (Muthén and Muthén 2012). The structural equation modeling proceeded in the following steps. We began the analysis by estimating the measurement model and inspecting the goodness‑of fit indices in order to evaluate to what extent the model fits the data. Then com‑ posite reliabilities and average variance extracted (AVE) of the respective scales were calculated, followed by tests to evaluate the convergent and discriminant validity. Next, we proceeded by estimating the structural model, which allowed us to examine the magnitude of the relationships between the factors as demonstrated by the regression coefficients. As regards the interaction effect, the chosen approach uses raw data of the indicators of the moderating factor to estimate the effect. It does not require a product term to be formed between the antecedent and moderator in order to create the latent interaction factor (Klein and Moosbrugger 2000). Finally, to evaluate the model fit we compared two nested models, whereby one included the moderating effect while the other one did not.

Results

This section begins with a presentation of the descriptive statistics. It then continues by testing the measurement and structural models and concludes by examining the statistical significance of the proposed relationships.

Descriptive Statistics

Table 1 provides an overview of descriptive statistics, Cron‑ bach’s alpha, and untabulated correlations between the vari‑ ables. Among the study variables, extrinsic motivation had the highest mean value (4.20), suggesting that business stu‑ dents find outcomes outside of studies (e.g., a high‑paying and prestigious job) to be important motivating factors. The mean values for moral meaningfulness and mindfulness are 3.80 and 3.27, respectively, while the lowest mean values pertain to social loafing intentions (2.12) and attitudes (1.60), on average indicating that business students hold relatively negative views of social loafing.

Measurement Model

To establish the validity and reliability of the scales, we first performed a series of confirmatory factor analyses, which are reported in Table 2. We inspected the factor load‑ ings and their significance levels for each underlying factor independently and dropped one indicator of the mindful‑ ness construct that exhibited a low loading (i.e., 0.293). The proposed five‑factor solution demonstrated an excel‑ lent fit with the data (χ2 = 239.833 (df = 160; p = 0.000); CFI = 0.962; TLI = 0.955; RMSEA = 0.040; SRMR = 0.042). The RMSEA and SRMR were well below the 0.8 threshold, while CFI and TLI were well above the required 0.9 values (Kline 2016; Hu and Bentler 1998). The standardized factor loadings were all significant and ranged between 0.629 and 0.882 for extrinsic motivation, 0.480 and 0.780 for moral meaningfulness, 0.510 and 0.792 for loafing intention, 0.578 and 0.756 for attitudes, and from 0.533 to 0.681 for mind‑ fulness. This attests to the convergent validity of the indi‑ cators. The proposed measurement model was superior to

Table 1 Descriptive statistics, Cronbach’s alpha, and correlations among the study variables

n = 319; Scales adopted a 5‑point response format with 1 indicating the minimum value and 5 the maxi‑ mum value. Reliabilities are displayed in the third column **p < 0.01. *p < 0.05

Variable M SD α 1 2 3 4 5

1. Social loafing intention 2.12 0.86 0.66 1 2. Social loafing attitude 1.60 0.69 0.80 0.50** 1 3. Mindfulness 3.27 0.73 0.72 − 0.21** − 0.20** 1 4. Moral meaningfulness 3.80 0.74 0.79 − 0.34** − 0.32** 0.14* 1 5. Extrinsic motivation 4.20 0.79 0.88 − 0.04 − 0.04 − 0.09 0.04 1

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the one‑factor model (χ2 = 1590.879 (df = 170; p = 0.000); CFI = 0.327; TLI = 0.924; RMSEA = 0.165; SRMR = 0.191). To further examine the reliability of the constructs, we com‑ puted the composite reliability which exceeded the required value of 0.7 for all constructs (Nunnally and Bernstein 2007; Hair et al. 2010). In addition, the values of AVE for the constructs were around 0.45 and above (see Table 3), which is reasonable (Netemeyer et al. 2003). In order to determine discriminant validity, we followed Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) approach where we compared the AVE of each construct with the shared variance (i.e., the squared

correlation) between the constructs (Farrell 2010). Because the values of AVE were higher than the squared correla‑ tions between the constructs, discriminant validity was confirmed (see Table 3). We ran an additional confirma‑ tory factor analysis whereby social loafing attitudes and intentions were collapsed into one factor and the resulting model fit was poorer than the proposed 5‑factor model at p = 0.001 (χ2 = 313.727 (df = 164; p = 0.000); CFI = 0.929; TLI = 0.918; RMSEA = 0.055; SRMR = 0.049; Δ = 73.894), providing further evidence of discriminant validity.

Table 2 Results of confirmatory factor analyses

n = 319 CFI comparative fit index, TLI Tucker‑Lewis index, RMSEA root‑mean‑square error of approximation, SRMR standardized root mean square residual ***p < 0.001 a Harman’s single factor model: all variables combined into a single factor b Social loafing attitudes and social loafing intentions collapsed into a single factor

Model Chi square (χ2) (df, p) Δχ2 CFI TLI RMSEA SRMR

Full measurement model, five factors

239.833 (df = 160; p = 0.000)

– 0.962 0.955 0.040 0.042

Model A, one factora 1590.879 (df = 170; p = 0.000)

1351.046*** 0.327 0.924 0.165 0.191

Model B, four factorsb 313.727 (df = 164; p = 0.000)

73.894*** 0.929 0.918 0.055 0.049

Table 3 Discriminant validity matrix

The values of AVE appear diagonally and below the diagonal are the squared correlations between the constructs

Social loafing intention

Social loafing attitude

Mindfulness Moral mean‑ ingfulness

Extrinsic motiva‑ tion

Social loafing intention 0.45 Social loafing attitude 0.25 0.46 Mindfulness 0.04 0.04 0.42 Moral meaningfulness 0.12 0.10 0.02 0.50 Extrinsic motivation 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.62

Fig. 1 Results of the hypotheses testing. Note Unstandardized regression coefficients are reported. *Significant at p ≤ 0.05. Arrow indicates sup‑ ported hypothesis

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Structural Model and Hypotheses Testing

Next, the relationships proposed in the conceptual model were tested and the results are summarized in Fig. 1. As standard model fit indicators are not available for latent inter‑ action models, the model is evaluated based on the follow‑ ing information criteria: Loglikelihood Value = − 7384.381, free parameters = 68; Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) = 14904.762. Hypothesis 1 assumed a negative rela‑ tionship between moral meaningfulness and social loafing attitudes and was supported (γ = − 0.26, p < 0.01). Further, Hypothesis 2 proposed that mindfulness is negatively related to social loafing attitudes. A significant regression coefficient provides support for this hypothesis (γ = − 0.17, p < 0.05). Hypothesis 3 contends that more favorable attitudes to social loafing are associated with greater social loafing intentions (γ = 0.76, p < 0.01), which is supported. Finally, the find‑ ings provide support for the moderating effect of extrinsic motivation, which was proposed in Hypothesis 4 (γ = 0.26, p < 0.01). Extrinsic motivation strengthens the relationship between attitudes and intentions. To evaluate the model fit and further establish the significance of the moderating effect, we compared nested models with and without inter‑ action. The fit indices for the model without the interaction yielded a poorer fit (Loglikelihood Value = − 7386.366, free parameters = 67; Akaike (AIC) = 14906.732). The loglikeli‑ hood difference between the two nested models was signifi‑ cant (3.974) at the 5‑percent level for one degree of freedom. Based on this, we can conclude that the model with interac‑ tion is superior and more parsimonious and can be accepted.

Discussion

Business ethics educators argue that the key to reducing aca‑ demic misconduct is through business ethics instruction (Wang and Calvano 2015). However, in order to facilitate change, edu‑ cators need to be familiar with the individual characteristics that influence such behavior. By considering the outcomes of business ethics education as predictors of academic miscon‑ duct, i.e., social loafing, this study attempts to add to earlier work by authors who emphasized the role of moral meaning‑ fulness (May and Luth 2013) and mindfulness (Pandey et al. 2018) in pedagogical interventions that shape moral reasoning. Unlike demographic factors, these factors are potentially open to manipulation either through a specific business ethics course or university ethical guidelines and codes of conduct (Jordan 2001). A better understanding of the drivers of social loafing intentions through an intra‑individual lens may offer the tools to address individual students’ academic misconduct. More specifically, while prior research on academic misconduct concentrated on cheating and plagiarism, this study instead looked at the dishonest act of social loafing which has become

a significant concern not only for universities and professors who encourage teamwork and students who are required to participate in teams as part of their studies, but also for manag‑ ers as the future employers of graduates. Because social loaf‑ ing is a complex phenomenon, this study drew on knowledge from different research fields and referred to three distinct factors that shape an individual’s decision to loaf, namely how involved students are in tasks (i.e., mindfulness), ethics (i.e., moral meaningfulness) and their studies in general (i.e., motivation). The study contributed to the literature on aca‑ demic misconduct and business ethics education by present‑ ing mindfulness and moral meaningfulness as novel predictors and introducing an alternative role for extrinsic motivation to explain social loafing.

The current study established the importance of moral meaningfulness in social loafing (Hypothesis 1) as it found that students who draw meaning from ethics in their stud‑ ies will hold more negative attitudes towards social loafing. If students find doing the right thing important, they will find withholding effort more unacceptable because it brings unfair advantages to loafers. Existing research on academic misconduct considers various ethical factors, such as ethi‑ cal orientation (Allmon et al. 2000) and moral philosophies (Sierra and Hyman 2008). Accordingly, this study extends their findings with an alternative concept that considers the meaning of ethics in a particular, i.e., educational, setting. May et al. (2013) reported that moral meaningfulness is influenced by business ethics education, and more attention should thus be devoted to ethical issues in class by encourag‑ ing discussions on ethics and providing ethical guidelines. In addition, Lau (2010) demonstrated the significant value of ethics education in improving students’ overall ethical orientation. Our results suggest that providing students with opportunities to increase the value of ethics in their lives, to see it as meaningful and, ultimately, to make ethics a part of their identities could lead students to constructively resolve moral issues (May and Luth 2013), i.e., social loafing.

Moreover, the relationship between mindfulness and social loafing attitudes was negative (Hypothesis 2), con‑ firming that students who are more observant, selfless, and guided by other‑oriented motives perceive social loaf‑ ing more negatively. This finding extends the reasoning of Valentine et al. (2010) who approached mindfulness as an outcome of ethical guidelines in a health care institution, whereas in this study mindfulness was treated as an anteced‑ ent, thereby establishing its position in business ethics edu‑ cation literature, where the interest in mindfulness is grow‑ ing (Good et al. 2016; Schuh et al. 2017). Extant research namely indicates that mindfulness not only makes people more aware of their own behavior, but also of occurrences in their environment (Brown and Ryan 2003; Dane and Brum‑ mel 2014). In turn, the realization of how hard their peers intend to work makes students more attentive to the amount

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of effort they themselves invest (Williams and Karau 1991). Therefore, the act of benefiting from other students’ work is less acceptable in the eyes of a mindful student. In line with scholars’ suggestions that mindfulness is “a stance of greater objectivity” (Adair and Fredrickson 2015, p. 198), mindful students would consider the issues of fairness, equality and justice when distributing the set tasks among peers. This corresponds with research indicating that mindfulness leads to more ethical decision‑making and less cheating (Ruedy and Schweitzer 2010). While previous empirical work has established mindfulness as a relevant determinant of proso‑ cial behaviors, showing how it facilitates more positive rela‑ tionships at work (Good et al. 2016; Hunter and McCor‑ mick 2008), our findings indicate that mindfulness can also contribute to reducing undesirable behaviors which greatly hinder a team’s effectiveness. By exploring the ‘dark side’ of teamwork, we expand the current understanding of the beneficial role of mindfulness in shaping more negative atti‑ tudes to social loafing.

Regarding the attitude–intention link (Hypothesis 3), atti‑ tudes to social loafing had a significant positive influence on loafing intentions. While this result is not surprising, it provides additional support for this relationship in the grow‑ ing academic misconduct literature (e.g., Stone et al. 2009; Mayhew et al. 2009; Harding et al. 2007), where the studies demonstrated the positive influence of attitudes on intentions to engage in various types of academic misconduct (Stone et al. 2009) or cheating in particular (Mayhew et al. 2009). By transferring this link to the social loafing context and confirming its significance, we demonstrate the relevance of attitudes in the formation of intentions to loaf, and the need to consider this relationship by researchers as well as busi‑ ness ethics educators, who are trying to limit and prevent it.

Finally, we found that extrinsic motivation is a significant moderator between attitudes and intentions (Hypothesis 4). By corroborating the moderating role of motivation, this study complements the findings of previous studies where motivation was positioned as an antecedent of academic mis‑ conduct (Davy et al. 2007) and critical thinking (Howard et al. 2015). Building on this knowledge, this study advances the understanding of the role of motivation in academic misconduct, i.e., social loafing. Jordan (2001) found both motivation and attitudes were related to cheating behavior. Furthering this insight, our findings indicate that for students with a more pronounced extrinsic motivation to study, the positive link between attitudes and intentions is stronger. In other terms, students whose main inclination to study stems from extrinsic factors (e.g., a desire to obtain a high salary or a better job later on) will be more likely to loaf if they evaluate it positively. These results suggest that extrinsic motivation drives students with positive attitudes to be will‑ ing to put even more effort into social loafing.

Implications

It is important to gauge business students’ attitudes not only to understand their behavior in student teams, but because students are the employees and managers of tomorrow, who are likely to transfer their work ethic and habits as well as experiences they acquire at university, including their way of working in teams, to the work environment. In times when higher education institutions and organizations are increasingly attempting to prevent harmful misconduct and facilitate the ethical development of their students, our study offers the following implications for universities and teach‑ ing practices.

First, we concur with researchers who have emphasized the importance of teaching about ethical challenges at uni‑ versity (Lau 2010; de los Reyes et al. 2017), as we found support for the role of moral meaningfulness in social loaf‑ ing attitudes, thereby providing pertinent implications for business ethics education. Students could be educated about academic misconduct as well as misconduct in business in order to facilitate their ethical development (Hanson et al. 2017). Universities could integrate ethics into courses across disciplines and stress the importance of ethical behavior by presenting real‑life cases of ethical lapses and discussing with students the ethical implications of different courses of action. Students could also study novels and—through story‑ telling—grow both professionally and personally (Michael‑ son 2016). Universities could organize keynote speeches on ethical issues by people who are recognized as role models in the business community. In this way, students would be equipped to solve the problems that arise during their studies and become better prepared to tackle challenges pertaining to misbehavior at work.

Second, our results indicate that mindfulness facilitates the formation of more critical attitudes to social loafing. Therefore, students could be guided towards a more mind‑ ful state in their team tasks, which would make them more observant of their own and others’ loafing incidences. One way to encourage students to be more present and pay atten‑ tion to the occurrences in their immediate environment is to make them acquainted with mindfulness training that, aside from benefiting teamwork, improves working memory capacity and reading comprehension (Mrazek et al. 2013). Acquainting students with the mindfulness concept and inte‑ grating mindfulness exercises into the curriculum could lead to more transformational learning, as recently demonstrated in a pedagogical innovation in an MBA leadership course (Kuechler and Stedham 2017). With regard to teamwork, students could be encouraged to consciously observe them‑ selves while performing their role and to reflect on a particu‑ lar team task. This could be achieved by using diaries (e.g., weekly logs) in which students reflect on their experiences both in and outside of class (e.g., during meetings with team

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members). These short reflective exercises could draw atten‑ tion to the ethical aspects of students’ own behavior as well as that of their peers. As mindfulness is also related to com‑ mitment (Zivnuska et al. 2016), such practices could have broader beneficial effects reflected in increased engagement in class.

Third, the present study found that students who find social loafing beneficial (i.e., have positive attitudes to social loafing) are more likely to shirk responsibility (i.e., have positive loafing intentions); therefore, educators should make it clear that social loafing is unacceptable. One way of doing this is to instruct students both on their duty to achieve objectives in a team project as well as on the equal distribution of tasks. The code of ethics and active discus‑ sions in class could point out the negative consequences of social loafing such as procrastination (Ferrari and Pychyl 2012), lower grades or even the failure to submit projects. The negative consequences a loafer causes for fellow team members should also be outlined. Universities could also rely on the following quote by Confucius (Jia and Jia 2017): “don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you” in presenting this issue to students.

Fourth, as the link between social loafing attitudes and intentions is stronger for extrinsically motivated students, educators could pay attention to students’ motivation when attempting to identify potential loafers. While extrinsic motivation per se does not have a negative connotation, it is problematic if, in conjunction with other factors, it results in individual actions that bring negative consequences for other people (e.g., peers, co‑workers). In teaching business ethics, it would be worthwhile to foster discussions about student motivation and the potential academic misconduct resulting from it because that would help increase students’ self‑awareness about their own motivation in a particular course, thereby enabling them to make more informed deci‑ sions regarding course selection (Cole et al. 2004). On a more general note, given the presence of team projects dur‑ ing studies, students could be frequently reminded of the dos and don’ts in teamwork and the characteristics of effective team members as well as those members who take advantage of others’ efforts while withholding their own. This should be followed by an outline of possible courses of action to ensure an equal division of tasks and the successful comple‑ tion of a project.

Limitations and Future Research

While the present study provides a meaningful contribution to the existing literature on social loafing, it is not without limitations. The first concerns the cross‑sectional design which limits the ability to firmly establish causality. Second, the sample was relatively homogenous (i.e., undergraduate students from a single business school in one geographic

location). In future research scholars could cross‑validate the proposed conceptual model on samples of students from other disciplines and countries. Related to this, it was not our intention to examine the influence of various demographic characteristics on social loafing, hence future studies could focus on other characteristics such as full‑ and part‑time studies and the duration and type of work experience to account for the possible differences. Level of study, namely the differences between undergraduate, graduate and PhD students could also be examined. This would allow research‑ ers to make more general conclusions about the nature of the phenomenon in question. Moreover, more attention could also be devoted to analyzing relationships through a cross‑ cultural lens by evaluating how prone social loafing is to the influence of individualist versus collectivist values.

In the current study, social loafing intentions were measured in team projects whereby the act of withholding effort mainly occurs outside of class. Yet, aside from group projects, social loafing can also occur during lectures, as exemplified by students not preparing for class, not reading the assigned materials, and relying on peers to participate in class discussions and share knowledge. Future research could thus also concentrate on understanding what causes social loafing in class.

This study was conducted in a higher education institu‑ tion and therefore certain constructs, i.e., moral meaningful‑ ness, attitudes, and intentions, were adapted to this setting. The values of the reliability coefficients for the social loafing intention scale were very close to the cut‑off values, imply‑ ing that its use in future studies should be reconsidered. Moreover, the values of AVE suggest that the transfer of measurement scales from other settings to examine social loafing may be problematic. This could be solved in future studies by using alternative scales for the chosen constructs. Alternatively, future research could replicate the research design in the workplace setting in order to test whether the model and its relationships hold there as well. In addition, because of the deficiencies in social loafing literature, the study’s approach was focused as it only introduced a narrow set of individual factors. The interaction between individual and group‑related factors could also provide a promising area for investigation.

Conclusion

Engaging in social loafing, a form of academic miscon‑ duct, not only impairs the learning process of the loafer, but decreases the motivations of his/her peers to participate in team tasks. If students experience frustration in team assign‑ ments during their studies and end up doing extra work to compensate for loafers, they might develop unfavorable atti‑ tudes towards collaborating with other people. Once in the

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workplace, these previous negative experiences can lead to an overall reluctance to become involved in teams and to then favor individual assignments. With ever more work in companies being performed in teams, knowing more about what drives social loafing at university is both timely and important for business ethics educators. The present study provides a fresh insight into the individual factors triggering social loafing intentions.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the students who participated in the study.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Measurement scales

Variable Composite reli‑ ability

Item

Social loafing intention 0.70 In future group projects, I may let my peers carry out some of my tasks/responsibilities If I had the opportunity, I would let my peers carry out some of my study assignments for me I would never let my peers do some of my study assignments for me

Social loafing attitude 0.81 I find social loafing… Good–bad Pleasant–unpleasant Foolish–wise Useful–useless Unattractive–attractive

Mindfulness 0.73 It seems I am “running on automatic” without much awareness I run through activities without being really attentive to them I get so focused on the goal I want to achieve that I lose touch with what I am doing right

now to get there—(dropped item) I do jobs or tasks automatically, without being aware of what I’m doing I find myself doing things without paying attention

Moral meaningfulness 0.80 Maintaining high morals/ethics brings me meaning at school I find that doing the “right thing” at school is personally meaningful for me Doing the ethical thing gives me purpose at school Behaving consistently with my morals is quite important to me

Extrinsic motivation 0.89 Why do you study? Because with only a high‑school degree I would not find a high‑paying job later on In order to obtain a more prestigious job later on Because I want to have “the good life” later on In order to have a better salary later on

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