How much has my co-worker contributed? The impact of anonymity and feedback on social loafing in asynchronous virtual collaboration

This paper reports an experiment that investigates how feedback about co-workerʹs performance and anonymity affect a team memberʹs performance in an idea generation task conducted asynchronously. The results indicated that there was no main effect of anonymity: anonymity by itself did not affect group performance. Receiving information about co-workerʹs performance increased group performance; however, the perceived level of co-workerʹs performance did not affect group performance. Participants who perceived that their co-workers had high performance experienced significantly more social comparison with identified input than with anonymous input. However, this motivation gain did not translate into a performance gain. Implications of these results and future research are discussed.