The Free Rider Problem

Understanding the concepts of the free rider problem.

Many people who work in teams or groups have a disdain for the free rider. In a team situation, there will always be people who pull a little less weight than the rest and it's important to know how to deal with it.

When I first entered my first year of university for engineering, we were given a paper on how to deal with unfair working situations in group work. Many of the suggestions can be described as increasing communication between members in order to align interests and simply reporting the problem to the supervisor.

Well, it is clear that the second option is often not sufficient in real life. What is important is that we need to understand what drives this discomfort within us and how to resolve it. This feeling is called inequality aversion (IA). It has been shown that the perceived lack of fairness (in the presence of strong IA) decreases productivity within a group, much more than the actual decrease brought by the free rider alone.

Bottom Line: It often pays more to ignore the free rider and take on a bit more work rather than worry about the problem so much.

That's not to say you shouldn't also continue to try to alleviate the problem by increasing communication, working on dispute resolution, and the alignment of interests.

Groupwork Tips: The Ringelmann effect

Beware of the Ringelmann Effect

On this blog, I often advocate working on something alone whenever possible, but of course there are many instances where that is not possible or simply not practical. Large projects will always require more than one person, and this is a good thing. However, one of the things we have to be aware of is the Ringelmann Effect. According to Wikipedia, "the Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases." So how do we combat this?

Well first we must understand why this is happening, two important reasons are the loss of motivation and the loss of coordination. Having led teams up to 20 people, I have found it best to break down your project into tasks which people can work on in isolation. When you have each team member solely responsible for something, the Ringelmann effect is much less pronounced because each person feels responsibility, autonomy, and ownership over their work. However, this requires modular coordination on the part of the leadership, and that in itself is another post entirely.