Several factors can influence the likelihood of social loafing occurring within a group. These include the size of the group, the demographic and cultural characteristics of its members, and interpersonal dynamics like social ties and perceived risk.

Factors Influencing Social Loafing

Social loafing is the tendency for individuals to devote less time or effort when working with others compared to working alone.

When an individual is not engaging with others in the group to complete the goal/task at hand, there is is a lack of task cohesion and equal contribution/effort being devoted to the task. 

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Creating a better task cohesion allows the group to share a similar identity and fosters better collaboration amongst all group members. 
Task cohesion can be increased by improving:
- social loafing
- interdependence
- collective efficacy
- collective task value
- communication quality

Improving Task Cohesion in Online Communities

To have a high task cohesion is when the interactions with members of the online learning community is of high quality. This usually involves being able to integrate findings/information from previous research into their comments or interactions with someone else, therefore giving better quality feedback with more support behind their suggestions.

Task Cohesion

Shiue, Y. C., Chiu, C. M., & Chang, C. C. (2010). Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(4), 768-777.

Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities

When the task requires an individual to rely on others to complete the task, it created a dependence on one another. This active interaction with one another also produces a cohesion amongst the ideas exchanged since they have to evaluate others' contributions before adding their own.

Increasing Interdependence in Online Communities

Collective efficacy is the shared belief that a group can perform the task at hand as a whole. When collective efficacy is high, task cohesion also increases. 

Collective Efficacy in Online Communities

Collective Task Value involves an individual's perception of the overall group's value of the task.
How to improve:
- discussing the importance of the value of the task
- discussing individually their interest in the task before beginning
- more autonomy for the students (giving feelings of ownership)

Improving Collective Task Value in Online Communities

Social loafing in Online Communities

Communication Quality can be improved based on the five dimensions it is composed of:

1. richness
2. openness
3. accuracy
4. appropriateness
5. quality group discussion

Communication Quality in Online Communities

Within the realm of task cohesion, cognitive engagement can be thought of as the amount of effort and/or quality of the communications and contributions toward helping one another in their work/assignments.

Cognitive Engagement in task cohesion

When measuring task cohesion, behavioral engagement involves the degree to which an individual has contributed to the online community, whether that be in comments or replies to others' comments, as well as how much they have interacted with the material individually, i.e. reading others' work or their own.

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