Group Dynamics in Greek Organizations

I’m in a fraternity, a group that I’ve enjoyed being a part of the past few years. Let’s be exceedingly generous and say that the group goal of a fraternity is to put on successful philanthropy events by making money and having fun. This sounds great, but it requires a lot of work to organize food and activities, conscribe volunteers, and advertise the event. Unfortunately, this group goal does not always align with individuals’ goals of having fun and doing as little work as possible. Moreover, my fraternity doesn’t have any selective incentives to align individual and group goals (i.e. get people to help). So instead, we try to motivate participation by saying, “You should help out,” a pretty normative statement. Needless to say, this leads to a lot of free-riding. At the end of the day, a few key people end up organizing and implementing everything. In this way, my fraternity can be loosely categorized as a privileged group with a few key individuals doing most of the work while everyone else benefits. The philanthropy event happens, and it’s pretty fun, but the potential of the 55-member group is not realized because of the lack of selective incentives.

Recently we tried to change this by implementing a point system to incentivize participation in things that people don’t want to do (like setting up/cleaning up philanthropy events). Eventually, the points earned would be added up to determine the order in which rooms in the chapter house would be picked. The argument for the point system was that it would incentivize participation (by providing selective incentives for people to not free-ride) and let us do things easier/better. The argument against the point system was that it would foster a sense of competition rather than brotherhood. It didn’t pass. For now, we’ll have to continue doling out normative statements like “Come help– you really should do this to help your fraternity,” rather than positive ones like “Come help– if you set up for this event you’ll get 50 points.” Although that can be a little frustrating, I’m thankful that we don’t have negative selective incentives (like monetary fines!) that some sororities use to prevent the free-rider problem in their group.