The ever-changing role of public-school principals is complex and overwhelming. Because instructional leadership impacts teaching practices and student achievement, this important principal role should be cultivated with principals having sufficient time to engage as instructional leaders. A generic qualitative inquiry methodology was used to explore how the size of an administrative team impacts principals' instructional leadership self-efficacy. Exploration was achieved through 10 one-on-one, semi-structured interviews and one focus group interview. The data suggest that team size does impact an administrator's ability to serve as an instructional leader. Participants reported that larger teams provided more time for working with individual teachers and collaborative teams. Although interviewed administrators did not always abandon instructional leadership when there was insufficient time, they did often sacrifice personal time to fit it in. Administrators did not believe that they had enough time to be instructional leaders, regardless of the team size, but they shared that there was more time to develop their instructional leadership principal self-efficacy when working on larger teams. Larger teams also provided administrators with greater diversity of perspectives and experiences, which they said cultivated their self-efficacy. Consequently, an opportunity exists for district administrators to consider the specific needs of each campus, the exhaustive list of duties given to campus administrators, and the importance of instructional leadership when making staffing decisions about the number of administrators allotted to each campus.

Social loafing is a phenomenon where individuals exert less effort in a group than when working alone. Social loafing has been widely examined through experimental studies, primarily conducted on face-to-face teams. The recent COVID-19 pandemic changed the working patterns around the world, increasing the amount of remote work in our society. This shift in working patterns resurfaces social loafing as an important area of research. Understanding the relationships between social loafing and its factors is important for increasing individual team members' efforts. This bachelor’s thesis aims to fill knowledge gaps by investigating the relationships between social loafing and the key factors explaining it. This research draws upon social identity and media richness theory to explain the relationships between individuals and groups and the role of communication mediums. Based on previous literature, we developed hypotheses concerning the effects of team size, cohesion, anonymity, and virtuality on social loafing. The findings reveal a significant correlation between team size, cohesion, and social loafing. Anonymity and virtuality showed no statistical significance with social loafing. Overall, the findings contribute to our understanding of key factors influencing social loafing. Future research is needed to explore the impact of these factors as well as additional factors that may contribute to the phenomenon that this study did not acknowledge. / Social medåkning är ett fenomen som karaktäriseras av att individer lägger ner mindre ansträngning när de arbetar i grupp än när de arbetar på egen hand. Social medåkning har studerats noggrant genom experimentella studier, främst på grupper som träffas fysiskt. Den senaste Covid-19-pandemin tiden förändrade arbetsmönstren runt i världen, vilket ökade mängden distansarbete i samhället. Distansarbete kan vara i sin tur att leda till social loafing genom att minska motivation och engagemang. Det är viktigt att förstå relationerna mellan social medåkning och dess faktorer för att öka prestationen hos gruppmedlemmar. Forskningen bygger på teorierna om “social identity” och “media richness” för att förklara relationerna mellan individer och grupper samt rollen hos kommunikationsmedier. Vi har utvecklat hypoteser om effekterna av gruppstorlek, sammanhållning, anonymitet och virtualitet baserade på tidigare litteratur. Detta kandidatarbete syftar till att undersöka relationerna mellan social medåkning och dess faktorer såsom gruppstorlek, sammanhållning, anonymitet och virtualitet för att förbättra prestationen i grupparbete. Resultaten visade på en signifikant korrelation mellan gruppstorlek, sammanhållning och social medåkning. Dessutom finns en signifikant korrelation mellan anonymitet och sammanhållning. Sammanfattningsvis bidrar forskningen till en ökad förståelse för de viktigaste faktorerna som påverkar social medåkning. Resultaten betonade vikten av gruppstorlek och sammanhållning, vilket pekar på att anonymitet och virtualitet kan ha begränsad effekt. Framtida forskning bör utforska inverkan av dessa faktorer samt ytterligare faktorer som kan bidra till fenomenet som denna studie ännu inte har uppmärksammat.

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