Does Teamwork Cure Procrastination, or Create It?

A short summary of Hattori, K. (2026) “Self-Starters Are Leaders: Present-Bias Asymmetry and Collective Procrastination”, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel, Hamburg.

Some of the results in this paper appear as “Procrastination Traps and Endogenous Leadership in Teams” in Economics Letters.

Background

Procrastination is usually thought of as an individual problem. You know the task should be done. There is a deadline. Your future self would clearly be better off if you got on with it. And yet, when the moment to start actually arrives, the immediate unpleasantness looms large and the task slides to tomorrow.

Economics often explains this as present bias. You understand the future benefit perfectly well, but you feel the immediate cost too heavily. So yesterday’s self planned to do it tomorrow, and today’s self decides that tomorrow would still be better.

What happens, then, when you work in a team?

Intuitively, a team ought to prevent procrastination. If you have planned to do something together with someone, you cannot let yourself be the one who slacks off. If your partner has started, you feel you have to start too. And indeed, joining a team does get some people moving who could not get moving on their own.

But the opposite happens as well. People who would have got on with it alone stop making progress the moment they are in a team. If the others are going to put it off too, my putting it off is hardly a big deal, and so everyone puts off what should be done. Nobody has behaved particularly badly, and yet nothing has begun.

Teamwork, then, seems able both to cure procrastination and to create it. This paper explains both from a single element. The key is not the value of acting. It is who is blamed for not acting.

What the paper does

Consider a team of two members. At the planning stage they agree on a joint plan to carry out a task. When the moment to carry it out arrives, each member chooses whether to act now or to shirk.

Each member is present-biased. At the planning stage, benefits and costs both lie in the future, so she compares them calmly and concludes that acting is worthwhile. On the day itself, the cost is immediate. Alone, this is enough to produce procrastination: she knew she should act, and she does not.

An important feature of this paper is that team members cannot free-ride on each other’s effort. Each has her own work to do, and a member who shirks gets nothing even if her partner acts. The procrastination studied here is therefore not the simple free-riding story in which I do nothing because you will do it for me.

What the paper focuses on instead is guilt. Having agreed on a joint plan, breaking it produces some guilt both toward oneself and toward one’s partner. But the size of that guilt depends on what the partner did.

If the partner acted and you alone shirked, you have let her down. She was counting on you to move as well, and you broke that expectation. Guilt is then large.

What if the partner shirked too? The plan is still broken, but the failure is not yours alone; it is a joint failure in which neither of you started. Responsibility is diffused. The feeling is less “I failed” than “we failed”, and the guilt is smaller.

Working within the guilt-aversion framework of Battigalli and Dufwenberg (2007), the paper derives the following ordering of guilt, rather than assuming it piece by piece.

Smallest is the guilt of shirking in a team when both members shirk. Next is the self-reproach of shirking when working alone. Largest is the guilt of shirking in a team when the partner acted and you did not.

This ordering is what generates the two faces of procrastination in teams.

What it finds

Teamwork can make procrastination worse

The first result is the case in which teamwork makes procrastination worse.

Working alone, failing to act leaves you with guilt toward yourself. You made the plan and you broke it. If that self-reproach is strong enough, you can get started despite present bias.

In a team, however, an equilibrium in which both members shirk becomes possible. If the partner has not started either, you have not singled her out for betrayal. The failure is shared and so is the responsibility. As a result, someone whose guilt would have moved her when working alone can end up in a state where neither member has started, and nothing gets done.

What is happening here is not that the task is not worth doing. The task is worth doing, and at the planning stage both members intended to do it. But once each expects the other not to move, the psychological cost of not moving falls. This is the mechanism behind collective procrastination.

Teamwork can also cure procrastination

The second result runs the other way. A team can also get moving someone who would procrastinate alone.

If you know that your partner will act, shirking on your own produces strong guilt. She expects you to act, and she has already started. Failing to move in that situation feels squarely like letting her down.

For this reason, someone who would lose to her present bias and procrastinate alone may act in a team whose other member is acting. A team can diffuse responsibility, but it can also make responsibility unmistakable.

The effect of teamwork is therefore not one-directional. It is neither the simple story that teams make people slack off nor the simple story that teams make people try harder. What a team changes is where the responsibility for inaction falls, and that change can make procrastination worse or better.

The problem is symmetry

What matters most in this paper is that collective procrastination appears as a problem of symmetry.

Suppose both members are of the type who will act if the partner acts but will not if the partner does not. Then a state in which both act is possible, and so is a state in which both procrastinate. The question is which one is realized.

Believe that your partner will move, and you move. Believe that she will not, and you do not.

Because of this mutual dependence, a team can land in the good equilibrium or in the bad one. In the bad equilibrium, each member reasons that the other was not expecting much anyway, and so feels little guilt about shirking. Neither starts, and that state confirms itself.

One self-starter changes the team

How, then, can this trap be escaped?

The paper’s second main result is that if the team contains even one self-starter, the collective procrastination trap disappears.

A self-starter here is a member who begins her own work regardless of whether the partner acts. When such a member is present, even a partner of the conditional type, who acts only if the other acts, will begin. Because the self-starter really does move, the partner’s situation becomes one of deciding whether to let down someone who is already working.

A single self-starter thus moves the whole team. Two members watching each other may never start. But once one of them starts for certain, the other follows. The procrastination trap disappears when the symmetry is broken.

Self-starters are leaders

This is where the paper’s title, “Self-Starters Are Leaders”, comes from.

A leader is not necessarily someone with a title. What matters in this model is that someone moves first, and does so for certain. If a leader commits to moving first and that action is visible to the other members, they decide what to do taking the leader’s action as given.

That is exactly the role a self-starter plays naturally. A self-starter begins on her own, title or no title. Once her action is something the other members can count on, the outcome is the same as when a leader moves first.

The paper therefore treats a self-starter as an endogenous leader. Leadership is not necessarily something an organization confers as a title. If a team contains someone who starts on her own, that person is already performing the leader’s role.

Put the other way round, an organization needs to install a leader precisely when the team has no self-starter. Nobody moves first. Everyone waits to see what the others will do. In that case the organization has to use the institution of leadership to manufacture a first mover.

What happens to a team with no self-starter?

There is more to the story.

One self-starter is enough to pull a team out of the trap, which is a reassuring result. But what about a team that has none? Everyone is of the conditional type who acts only if the others act, and nobody moves first. Is there no way out for a team that does nothing but watch one another?

In fact, even without a natural self-starter, a team can sometimes produce a first mover on its own. The key is a member who sees through her own weakness.

The member who foresees her own delay

There are two kinds of present-biased people.

Some are unaware of their own present bias (naives). At the planning stage they sincerely believe that tomorrow’s self will do the work properly. Then the day comes and they put it off again. They did not see their own procrastination coming.

Others see through their own weakness (sophisticates). At the planning stage they already foresee that when the day comes, they will slack off again.

Someone who sees her own weakness can take steps in advance. If she knows that her future self will procrastinate, she can bind that self, for instance by making a visible pledge that she will definitely do it, so that she cannot back out later. This is how she deprives her future self of an escape route.

Doing so is costly, however. Binding yourself is not comfortable. Even so, someone who foresees her own procrastination may judge that binding herself is worth the price.

Paying to become a self-starter

Once bound, she cannot procrastinate when the day arrives. Having made the pledge, she works whatever her partner does.

This is precisely the behavior of a self-starter. She was not born one. But by seeing through her own weakness and paying to bind herself, she has become one.

And if the pledge is visible to her partner, the partner follows. Being of the conditional type, the partner acts on the premise that the other will act. The member who bound herself thus pulls the whole team out of the trap.

What is happening here continues the earlier story. Self-starters were leaders. And someone who sees her own weakness becomes a leader by paying to make herself a self-starter. The route to leadership is not disposition alone. Self-awareness produces leaders too.

The interesting thing is that this member is exactly like her partner. Same present bias, same temptation to put things off. On the day itself there is no difference in their weakness. They differ in one respect only: whether they foresee in advance that they have it.

What breaks this team’s symmetry, in other words, is neither strength of will nor superior ability. It is awareness of one’s own weakness. “I am probably going to slack off, so let me bind myself now.” One member thinking that way is enough to set the whole team in motion.

And this mechanism works precisely because of present bias. The planning self and the acting self disagree, and it is that disagreement that makes the planning self want to bind the acting one. If the two never disagreed, there would be nothing to bind. Procrastination itself, one might say, is what produces leadership here.

Why it matters

Don’t read team procrastination as mere laziness

The first implication is that procrastination in teams should not be read simply as laziness or lack of ability.

Each member may well understand the value of the task. Each might have started it alone. And yet, in a team, responsibility is diffused, nobody feels particularly at fault, and the work stalls.

What is needed in that case is not only telling people to try harder. What matters is making visible who is doing what, who is counting on whom, and who has started. Procrastination is a problem of time management, but it is also a problem of where responsibility is attributed.

The value of whoever moves first

The second implication is that a first mover matters to a team.

In large projects, everyone can end up waiting until everyone is ready. The team would move if someone began, but nobody begins, and the project stalls.

This paper explains what a self-starter is worth in that situation. A self-starter is not simply a diligent person. By starting, she changes the situation everyone else faces. If the partner is already moving, the guilt of being the only one who does not rises, so the other members begin too.

A self-starter, in short, is someone who changes the team’s psychological equilibrium.

A second role for leadership

The third implication is that leadership should not be thought about only as the ability to direct.

Leaders do of course set direction and hold members together. But what this paper emphasizes is a simpler function. A leader is an institution for producing a first mover.

In a team where nobody moves, the leader’s moving first changes the conditions under which everyone else acts. Once the leader has started, the other members’ condition, that they act if the other acts, is satisfied. In this sense, leadership can be understood as a device for manufacturing a self-starter within the team.

The value of knowing your own weakness

And one more thing. Leaders are not necessarily appointed from outside.

Someone who knows she tends to procrastinate can bind herself in advance: announce a deadline publicly, promise someone else regular progress, build a mechanism she cannot back out of. These tricks for binding oneself look at first like matters of personal self-management. But if she binds herself visibly, that becomes a signal to the whole team. Once the others know that this person will definitely deliver, they start moving too.

Admitting your own weakness and acting on it in advance can itself be leadership as far as the team is concerned. It is not the flawless person who becomes the leader. Sometimes the person who knows she is not flawless becomes the leader precisely because she knows it.

In closing

Teamwork can cure procrastination and it can make it worse. The difference comes not from the value of the task but from where the responsibility for not doing it goes.

If neither member moves, the failure is shared and the guilt is thinned out. If one member moves, the other’s inaction stands out and the guilt is sharpened.

This simple difference can stall a team or set it going. And one person starting on her own can change what the whole team does.

That first mover appears in two ways. One is the person who moves on her own by disposition. The other is the person who sees through her own weakness, pays to bind herself, and thereby becomes someone who moves on her own. The first appears when members differ in type. The second can appear even when everyone is identical, so long as there is self-awareness.

A self-starter is not merely someone who works quickly. In a team, her presence gets the other members moving as well. And even when a team has no natural self-starter, a member who knows her own weakness can make herself into one. That is why a self-starter is a leader, with or without the title.

This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 24K04912.