Bad apple or bad barrel?

Have you ever worked with some one who behaves like a brat at work? Most people have and most of us have also told ourselves that we were grown-ups who could simply rise above it and get on with the job.

Will Felps, Terence Mitchell and Eliza Byington took that idea seriously enough to write a paper about it in 2006 called "How, when, and why bad apples spoil the barrel", in which they pulled together the existing research on what happens to groups when one member behaves badly.

They described three kinds of bad apple. The first is the person who withholds effort and lets everyone else carry the load. The second is the person who is persistently negative in mood and outlook. The third is the person who breaks the basic rules of respect by mocking, insulting or dismissing the people around them. In plain language, these are the Slacker, the Downer and the Jerk, and I suspect you have already put a face to at least one of them.

Felps then tested the idea in an experiment that sounds more like the set-up for a sitcom than a piece of organisational research. He put teams of four together, three university students and one actor called Nick, whose job was to play either the jerk, the slacker or the depressive pessimist while the group worked on a task together.

The teams with Nick in them performed 30 to 40 per cent worse than the teams without a bad apple, which is a remarkable drop when you consider that one person made up only a quarter of the group and the other three were perfectly capable of doing good work.

The part that that’s a wee bit uncomfortable to acknowledge is what happens to others when exposed to a bad apple. We don’t compensate for the Nick - we start to become like him. When Nick played the jerk, the others got snippy, argued and stopped sharing useful information. When he played the slacker, someone would eventually suggest they all just get it over with. When he played the pessimist, the whole group ended up slumped with their heads on the desk.

There was one exception, which I find the most hopeful part of the whole story. One group did well despite Nick, and the difference was a single student who asked questions, drew everyone into the conversation and calmed things down before arguments took hold. Felps suggested that good leadership was the thing that stopped the rot from spreading.

In summary, bad apples create bad barrels — behaviour - both good and bad is viral. When destructive behaviour shows up in a team - it takes leadership to navigate through it.

Reference: Felps, W., Mitchell, T. R., & Byington, E. (2006). How, when, and why bad apples spoil the barrel: Negative group members and dysfunctional groups. Research in Organizational Behavior, 27, 175–222. The details of the experiment with the actor come from Felps's account on This American Life, episode 370, "Ruining It for the Rest of Us" (2008).