Seeking Harmony Rather Than Efficiency: The Effect of Self-Construal on Social Compensation

Many studies have discussed how motivation in task-related groups is affected by culture. Despite this, the psychological processes underlying these cultural differences have not yet been fully investigated. This study examined the effects of self-construal on social compensation, that is, motivation gain caused by the expectation of coworkers' poor performance. Participants were 111 Japanese undergraduate students. They were asked to engage in nine tasks as a team with a coworker whose intelligence was inferior or superior and allocate tasks between themselves and their coworkers. We measured the number of tasks that participants selected as their own work as a dependent measure. The results showed that those with interdependent selves were less likely to engage in social compensation even when their coworkers' capability was low.