Academic

One Bad Apple

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

Are you searching for a New Year's Resolution? Here is a suggestion: don't be a bad apple.

This American Life recently did a program entitled "Ruining it for the Rest of Us," and the first part of the program featured an interview with Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands. As a grad student at the University of Washington, Felps studied the effect of bad apples (slackers, depressive pessimists, and jerks) on teams and found that bad apples can indeed spoil the whole bunch. The results are based on experiments using college students -- and the teams were formed for only 45 minutes -- so all of the obvious disclaimers apply, but this is pretty fascinating stuff and it comports with some of my own experiences.

Here is the abstract of Felps' article, How, when, and why bad apples spoil the barrel: Negative group members and dysfunctional groups:

This paper presents a review and integrative model of how, when, and why the behaviors of one negative group member can have powerful, detrimental influence on teammates and groups. We define the negative group member as someone who persistently exhibits one or more of the following behaviors: withholding effort from the group ["slacker"], expressing negative affect ["depressive"], or violating important interpersonal norms ["jerk"]. We then detail how these behaviors elicit psychological states in teammates (e.g. perceptions of inequity, negative feelings, reduced trust), how those psychological states lead to defensive behavioral reactions (e.g. outbursts, mood maintenance, withdrawal), and finally, how these various manifestations of defensiveness influence important group processes and dynamics (e.g. cooperation, creativity). Key mechanisms and moderators are discussed as well as actions that might reduce the impact of the bad apple. Implications for both practice and research are discussed.

If you want to hear Felps describe his work, go listen to the podcast.

By the way, the TAL website lists the song "One Bad Apple" as being performed by the Jackson 5, but it was the Osmonds. If you just listened to the following clip, you would think it's Michael Jackson, but that's Donny ...

Full post as published by Conglomerate on December 31, 2008 (boomark / email).