How much has my co-worker contributed? The impact of anonymity and feedback on social loafing in asynchronous virtual collaboration

•We investigate how feedback about co-worker's performance and anonymity affect a team member's performance in an asynchronous idea generation task.•Anonymity by itself does not affect group performance.•Feedback information about co-worker's performance does not affect group performance.•Significant social comparison is experienced by people who work with high-performing co-workers in identified settings.

This paper reports an experiment that investigates how feedback about co-worker's performance and anonymity affect a team member's performance in an idea generation task conducted asynchronously. The results indicated that there was no main effect of anonymity: anonymity by itself did not affect group performance. Receiving information about co-worker's performance increased group performance; however, the perceived level of co-worker's performance did not affect group performance. Participants who perceived that their co-workers had high performance experienced significantly more social comparison with identified input than with anonymous input. However, this motivation gain did not translate into a performance gain. Implications of these results and future research are discussed.