The Effects of Real-Time Individual Performance Feedback and Goal Setting on Computer-Mediated Group Idea Generation

Prior computer-mediated group idea generation research has concluded that social loafing is likely an important factor in reducing individual and group task performance. Group researchers—both focusing on non-technology and technology-mediated groups—have theorized that loafing could be minimized if individuals and groups were given either clear feedback on their task performance or if given clear and attainable performance goals. To examine the efficacy of these interventions on task performance, a computer-mediated idea generation environment was constructed that provided performance feedback for all group members where each member could view how many ideas every group member produced throughout an experimental session. In addition, this environment supported the ability to set a challenging, but attainable, performance goal for each group member (i.e., throughout a session, each member was able to track their performance toward a pre-set performance goal). Using this computer-mediated environment, a laboratory experiment was conducted with five-member groups that examined the influence of both goal setting (i.e., explicit–difficult versus do your best) and performance feedback (i.e., performance feedback versus no-performance feedback) in a 2 × 2 factorial design on group task performance. Providing performance feedback was found to significantly improve task performance. Additionally, performance feedback and goal setting interacted, such that groups in the performance feedback/explicit–difficult goal treatment had the highest performance. The implications of these results for future research, as well as the implications for the design of the human-computer interface in electronic group idea generation systems, are discussed.