Abstract
Two studies examined the effort that participants expended on a
challenging physical persistence activity when that activity was
a critical part of a divisible conjunctive task performed by two
people working as a team compared to when it was structured as
an individual task performed by one person working alone.
It was found that participants put greater effort into that
activity when they worked as part of a team task comparted to
when they work alone—a motivation gain when working in
groups. This gain occurred despite the absence of any
apparent task-related ability differences among participant, and
is most parsimoniously explained by the greater indispensability
associated with working on a critical element of a divisible
conjunctive group task. The implications of these results
for the occurrence of motivation gains on other types of tasks
and in real-world work settings are discussed.