Social laziness, or why it is often better to do everything yourself

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

There is a famous statement, which not only heard, but everyone was probably convinced of the truth of which: “if you want to do something well and correctly, do it yourself”. Once, it would seem, I found the answer to the question of why this is happening. But it was not there. Relatively recently, I had to figure it out again, more deeply. I found one of the possible reasons, which I will describe here. We will talk about the effect of social laziness, but I will start a little from afar - with a description of the three basic reasons for the truth of this phrase, which previously seemed sufficient to me.

The first reason … It is clear that in the system of commodity and service-money relations, when someone does work to another for a fee, it is unlikely that he will do it as well as for himself. You pay money, and the employee does it according to the principle "if only it works." Why? An employee just needs to get money to live - and this money is usually small (otherwise competitors will offer a cheaper option), which means, most likely, a decrease in the price of a service is at the expense of quality, because the employee has to do more work in order to get the desired amount. So the worker does anyhow, for exactly the amount for which in our society he has to sell his labor. To sell your labor at a higher price, you need to gain prestige and fame … and also find a good sales market, because a modern consumer is not very smart and would rather buy consumer goods at a discount than normal goods, or hire “Tajiks” instead of professionals (the word “Tajik "- this is not an appeal to the nation, but only an indication of the style of work). Thus, if a person knows how to do something on his own, then usually he does it to himself well.

In other situations, where money is not received directly for a specific service (say, when working in a corporation for a salary), requests are usually fulfilled according to the same principle “just to get off”. It is clear that if the boss asks him to do something, then it will not be good to point him to the employment contract and read out his powers, he’s the boss, he must be obeyed, and since in the modern world the principle of “there are no irreplaceable people” often works, in the case of even legal refusal can "accidentally" lose your job. So everything is done at the lowest possible level, so that they don't get fired.

The second reason … In friendly relations, on the contrary, the desire to do even better than oneself usually dominates. This explains quite well the classical psychology of relationships. However, the problem is that a friend may have a different idea of quality, and he will do everything "on his own", and you will find it inconvenient to use the product or the result of work will seem insufficiently high-quality (by your standards). This is a painful problem for all hyper-responsible people - they have extremely high criteria for the quality of work and it is almost impossible to please them, unless the employee is a professional of international level.

Third reason, very rare. The job can be so difficult that there is no one among friends or employees who is sure to cope with it. In this case, you need to do it yourself, because this is the only way you can reliably determine the cause of a probable failure and in the best way for yourself to cope with a non-standard situation. No one other than you will be able to figure out how you can resolve an unusual situation so that it would be most convenient for you to live with it further. Moreover, if you are a very responsible person, then in case of failure you will not be tempted to believe that someone else is to blame for this, that he has not invested enough energy - only you are to blame and this partly gives some reassurance, because you know for sure that they did everything possible, which almost never can be said about an employee.

So it seemed to me that no further explanation is needed here. That is, when asked why it is better to do many things myself, I found three explanations for different cases and they were always enough to understand why I again “need to redo everything for this person myself”. But it was not there…

Social laziness and its manifestation in the form of the Ringelmann effect

Unfortunately, I had to face a situation when, in a friendly team of quite intelligent and very deeply thinking people, about half a dozen in number, some work (the essence of which is not so important) was performed at the level of one average performer. Just imagine: six or seven smart and responsible people could not organize themselves in such a way that the quality of the execution of a very simple task even reaches the level of ordinary professional work of one person! The most paradoxical is that in this team I could not work more than 10% of the effort, because everything was wildly slowing down and did not want to be resolved, therefore, when I got out of there, great opportunities immediately opened up when I began to do the work myself … The work went almost 10 times better, gradually outstripping the level of work of the braking team. It was necessary to understand why this is happening. Below is one explanation. I know for sure that it is not complete and does not explain the whole plot, but I keep looking for answers.

There is an old parable: in the village on the eve of the holiday, the inhabitants decided to pour a barrel of vodka to draw from there during the celebration. From each house it was required to bring one bucket of this drink. When the barrel was full, it turned out that it contained pure water instead of vodka. Everyone thought that in the general mass no one would notice the buckets of water and brought water instead of vodka.

This, in short, is the essence of social laziness - the opposite of synergy. The synergy effect, which should occur in any well-coordinated team, in practice almost always turns into the Ringelmann effect. Now I will explain the essence of both.

The synergy effect is when the efficiency of the team exceeds the total efficiency of each employee separately. The simplest example: one adult man may well lift two cans of 20 liters of water with both hands. However, the same man will not be able to lift a large object (say, a large box) weighing 40 kg, because he simply will not wrap his arms around it so as to lift it. But two could easily lift a large object, taking it from both sides, even if its weight is twice as much, that is, 80 kg. This is how they drag, for example, sofas or other furniture: if one person pulls the sofa, and the second - the refrigerator, then they will drag them much longer than if both first grab the sofa and then the refrigerator, just easily transferring them to the desired one. place. In general, there are many examples.

The Ringelmann effect is, on the contrary, a decrease in the level of contribution of each participant with an increase in the group. Contrary to the general belief that collective work is more productive than single work, in practice in our society in almost all cases (except perhaps dragging sofas) it is the Ringelmann effect that is observed. Especially with poor organization of the collective's activities, where the individual characteristics of each of its members are not taken into account at all.

In collective work, a person may not give all his best, but only partially, knowing that the work is still going on. If we also take into account the costs of trying to come to an agreement with each other, especially in a team where people understand the meaning of the word "work" in completely different ways, then we get a wild decline in productivity. And when one person, on whom the next stage of work depends, suddenly disappears just at the time when the second can work, but instead of work stupidly waits for an answer from the first, then it’s generally a pipe. Especially when the first one suddenly returns, and the second is already busy with something else. As a result, it turns out that one person may well work for ten, when he knows what to do and is not distracted by the coordination with the rest of the common areas of work. He simply takes and does, without explaining anything to anyone, reporting to anyone, not adjusting to anyone and not expecting anyone. At any time, by himself distributing it according to his tasks, he simply spends his resources as efficiently as possible to achieve the goal.

A well-coordinated organization of even two people requires certain management skills. It may seem to someone that this is not so, but in fact it is, it is just that such a person has never solved serious problems in his life. I often noticed that when working together, the result was not 200%, but only from 120% to 180% (and even then in a very good scenario). The three of us instead of 300% get 190% -210% of the strength.

With proper management of good responsible people, the effectiveness should be greater than the total efficiency of separately working people. Therefore, if the effect of social laziness is observed in the team (as an option, in the form of the Ringelman effect), then there are two options: either the team consists (in the majority) of people who do not know how to work in principle, that is, they are slovens or losers in life (and do not want to voluntarily correct their situation), or the management system is incorrectly adjusted and something prevents it from being established correctly (perhaps, some individual people from the team or personal circumstances interfere). In the first case, it is better to leave the team and do everything yourself; in the second, you can try to organize the work so that people work as independently as possible, without being able to interact, so that everyone does their job separately and independently of the others. Then everyone will work as a whole at their maximum level and the amount will at least be equal to the overall effect, and not lower than it. To achieve synergy, you need to gradually unite one person after another, checking the overall efficiency at each step of unification - it should not fall.

In our modern society, it is often impossible to resolve the issue of management on a voluntary basis (without the use of psychological manipulations, trying to explain the situation purely logically). Even after reaching agreement on some issues in theory, it quickly turns out that in practice everything is completely different, and the persistence with which people defend their beliefs often exceeds the limit of rationality. Therefore, unfortunately, in our society we almost always have to act like a character in a famous animated series:

Although this is not the right decision, it brings more benefits than an attempt to spend ten times more time on implementing the right decision in a team, in principle unable to bear and support this correct decision.

Yes, this effect also has an interesting feature: each person individually does not recognize the presence of this effect in his team, everyone will be sure that he is doing everything right. This is due to the misinterpretation of the word “correct”. The word “right” in collective work is when it’s not right for you, but when everyone’s all together is right as a whole, that is, when the goal is achieved, and tasks are solved with the best efficiency of the team (this is quite well calculated for typical tasks).

Subtotal … If you see that the team does not want to work effectively and comes to the point that you alone could do the job no worse than all of them together, then blame it out of there, if for some reason you cannot organize the work correctly. With people who do not know how to work, the conversation should be simple: either, or. That is, either a person works or goes his own way, when it is clear that interaction cannot be established. This is not bad and not good, because to each his own - and everyone decides this for himself … and he also bears responsibility.

Perhaps to be continued.