Decreasing Tax Collectors' Perceived Social Loafing through Collaborative Behaviors of Taxpayers

Abstract

Social loafing is a common social disease whereby individuals exhibit lower performance when they work in a group than when they work alone, causing waste of manpower in organizations. Past researches on antecedent variables of social loafing tend to focus on the impacts of the personal and job characteristics within organizations, but few have considered the impacts of external factors on social loafing. This study takes as its object of investigation the tax collectors of Taipei National Tax Administration, which has reformed itself as a “tax service agency,” with the purpose of exploring the effect of taxpayers’ collaborative behaviors in the service production and delivery processes on the perceived social loafing of tax collectors. It finds empirically that all three kinds of collaborative behaviors (i.e., voluntary compliance, trust, and evaluative feedback) and the aggregate thereof, as perceived by tax collectors, have significant negative correlations with the perceived social loafing of tax collectors. What is more, the effects of these collaborative behaviors on tax collectors’ perceived social loafing are greater than those of the control variables in this study (i.e., the employees’ job involvement and job characteristics). These results provide powerful evidence for the feasibility of direct citizen participation in the production and delivery processes of public services and indicate that the government should prioritize decreasing the perceived social loafing in service agencies via direct citizen participation.

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