Abstract
Recent research has demonstrated that group motivation gains due to social indispensability are not restricted to the research laboratory but can be found in existing groups performing meaningful tasks. Our own previous research showed that freestyle swimmers at the 2008 Olympics swam faster in the relay than in the individual competition when swimming at the relay’s later positions. Using aggregated data of freestyle and medley relays from the final heats of the four most recent Olympic Games, we show that high specificity of information on the partners’ performance is a precondition for indispensability effects to occur. As expected, motivation gains in the relay as compared to the individual competition were demonstrated for swimmers at relay positions 2–4, but only in freestyle relays where effort and efficiency of preceding swimmers could be reliably assessed by swimmers. In medley relays, where such feedback is more ambiguous, no motivation gains occurred.
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