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Discusses that for TQM to succeed, management must be prepared to lead and motivate the workforce. Asserts this is accomplished by creating a corporate vision of quality, training employees to understand the concept of the quality chains and empowering workers to assume individual responsibility for each quality process. Looks at the mastered process as quality criterion. Concludes that the most effective compensation for an employee is having his/her proposals listened to, discussed and implemented where appropriate.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the assumption that process losses of individuals working in teams are unavoidable. The paper aims to challenge this assumption on the basis of social identity theory and recent research.

The approach adopted in this paper is to review the mainstream literature providing strong evidence for motivation problems of individuals working in groups. Based on more recent literature, innovative ways to overcome these problems are discussed.

A social identity‐based analysis and recent findings summarized in this paper show that social loafing can be overcome and that even motivation gains in group work can be expected when groups are important for the individual group members' self‐concepts.

The paper provides human resource professionals and front‐line managers with suggestions as to how individual motivation and performance might be increased when working in teams.

The paper contributes to the literature by challenging the existing approach to reducing social loafing, i.e. individualizing workers as much as possible, and proposes a team‐based approach instead to overcome motivation problems.