The phrase "one bad apple spoils the barrel" implies the undesirable behaviour of one person can spread to others, impacting the performance of an entire team. Many have experienced this phenomenon, feeling like their team is falling well short of its potential. But is there any evidence supporting this phenonium? A fascinating study has shown that indeed, a single, toxic team member can create group-wide dysfunction and breakdown.

Bad Apple

The Toxic Blend: How One Rotten Apple Spoils the Barrel

We have all worked in teams where there is that one “difficult” person. They often display a lack of respect for their colleagues, disregard for team goals, and have an unwillingness to take responsibility for their actions. They may engage in gossip, create conflicts, and foster a hostile work environment.

They seem to consume a disproportionate amount of time and energy. Conversations with them feel “heavy” and they tend to sap your energy. There are many common examples - The Brilliant Jerk, The Controller, The Slacker, The Anti-Establishment Person, The Career Politician, The Passive-Aggressive.

The Impact of Toxicity on Team Dynamics

Often teams don’t have any choice but to do their best and simply tolerate the difficult person, citing personality eccentricities, often with a roll of the eyes. The impact can be severe, ranging from reduced morale, increased stress, burnout, turnover, low levels of creativity and problem solving, along with reduced productivity.

The negative influence of a toxic team member can spread like wildfire, causing dysfunction in the entire group.
- Simon Sinek

The Toxic Team Member: A Catalyst for Chaos

Will Felps, Associate Professor of Organization & Personnel Management at Rotterdam School of Management, published a fascinating paper titled How, When, And Why Bad Apples Spoil The Barrel: Negative Group Members And Dysfunctional Groups. The paper discusses how, when, and why the behaviours of one negative group member can have a powerful, detrimental influence on an entire team. In other words, how one bad apple can rot the barrel.

Felps conducted a social experiment. He took groups of four college students and arranged them into teams. Each team had to compete against the other to solve some management problems. Unbeknown to them, Felps planted an actor in each team, designed to feign one of the three personality types Felps suspected caused major issues:

The Depressive Pessimist - will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed.
The Jerk - will say that other people's ideas are not adequate but will offer no alternatives himself. They'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert - me."
The Slacker - will say "whatever", and "I really don't care."

The existing research assumed that groups had the ability to overcome bad apples and the power of the group would override the bad apple forcing them to change their behaviour. However, Felps findings proved otherwise.

Groups with a bad apple performed 30 to 40 % worse than groups without a bad apple. The ability to get along, share work and collaborate significantly dropped in groups with a bad apple.

Poor functioning team

The Domino Effect: From Toxicity to Dysfunction

In groups with a bad apple, other team members begin to take on the bad apple's negative behaviour. When the bad apple actor acted out one of the three personalities, the other team members started to act in the same way. When the actor was a jerk, other team members would begin acting like a jerk. When the actor was a slacker, they began to slack, too. Even worse, they didn’t just act this way to him – they acted this way towards all other team members. The bad behaviour had a ripple-on effect, propagating that type of behaviour throughout the team.

This is an immensely important discovery. One bad apple can cause rot in the entire cart by altering the behaviour of everyone.

Interestingly, there was one exception in the experiment. One group performed well, despite having a bad apple. The difference? This group had a leader with strong skills in diffusing conflict.

Psychological Safety

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson identified psychological safety as a cornerstone of effective teamwork and organizational success. Psychological Safety is a vitally important part of our consulting work at Radically.

Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." Project Aristotle, an initiative at Google, sought to uncover the dynamics of successful teams and identified psychological safety as one of the key factors driving high-performing teams. They found psychological safety was more impactful than the next four factors combined.

However, a culture of psychological safety isn't just a leader's job - it is everyone's responsibility, especially as organisations become more decentralised and self-managed.

Restoring Harmony to Rebuild a Dysfunctional Team

So if undesirable behaviour can damage teams, and it can spread, what can we do about it?

There are broadly two key ways to approach this - by developing a group's ability to self-manage this and through people in leadership and management roles supporting this. the combination of both is the most successful approach.

The Power of Teamwork

Humans naturally form social group norms to guide behaviour. Norms take shape and change over time as the group evolves. Often group norms are implied and unstated, detected through the day-to-day interactions with others.

One way to help bring this into focus is to establish a team charter. This preventative action involves a team defining their desired values and behaviours. It can be quickly achieved with little more than a flipchart and some markers, using prompts such as

What would make our team powerful?
What can we count on from each other?
How do we want to be when we are challenged?

A team charter provides a clear statement of expectations - that is, what good looks like. If behaviour slips off track, the group's role is to call each other out and self-moderate. However, this assumes the group has the capability and experience to do this. enter the leadership role.

The Role of Leadership

A good leader will help a group retain ownership of their behaviour and step in if it becomes unsafe or they see the group struggling with a lack of skills and experience.

A technique I frequently use is to help the group "notice" their behaviour if it differs from what they said was important in their team charter. The way you do this is very important. Avoid assumptions and embrace curiosity: "I am noticing that [observation]. Do you notice that too or am I misreading the situation?" If they agree, I might facilitate a discussion on what happened and what we can learn from this to improve. Note at no point am I taking ownership. The group is accountable for their behaviour. Reveal dont resolve.

Motivational interventions

Felps calls these “motivational interventions” - acts of teammates that attempt to change negative behaviour via influence. His research shows this is an effective way to deal with The Slacker and The Brilliant Jerk, but is less successful with the Depressive Pessimist. Most people do not have the techniques required to resolve a teammate’s negative moods, and so tend to simply avoid or reject them. This is where a different leadership stance kicks in. Rather than facilitating (which is for a group), a personal coaching stance would probably be a better choice. In other words, connect with them, empathise, share how you observe their behaviour impacting the group, and help them consider some options to move forward.

Honest conversation in a team

Conclusion

In conclusion, the impact of a toxic team member carries profound implications for group dynamics and team performance. The fascinating study by Will Felps has provided valuable insights into the impact of a single toxic team member on an entire group. This research has shown that the negative influence of such an individual can indeed spread like wildfire, leading to reduced morale, increased stress, burnout, turnover, and decreased productivity within the team.

Moreover, Felps' experiment shed light on the domino effect of toxicity, where other team members often begin to adopt the negative behaviour exhibited by the bad apple, causing a ripple effect of dysfunction throughout the group. This discovery underscores the critical importance of addressing toxic behaviour promptly and effectively.

Psychological safety, as highlighted by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, emerges as a vital factor in promoting effective teamwork and organizational success. It is essential for fostering an environment where individuals feel safe to take interpersonal risks, contributing to high-performing teams.

To counter the detrimental impact of toxic team members and restore harmony within a dysfunctional team, there are two key approaches: empowering the group to self-manage behaviour and leveraging leadership to guide and support the team when necessary.

Motivational interventions, as described by Felps, offer a powerful tool for addressing negative behaviors, especially when coupled with a coaching stance that emphasizes empathy and constructive feedback.

In summary, the study by Will Felps and the broader discussion surrounding toxic team members emphasise the importance of fostering positive group dynamics and addressing negativity promptly. By promoting psychological safety, establishing clear expectations, and combining self-management with effective leadership, teams can mitigate the influence of the "bad apple" and work together harmoniously to achieve their goals and reach their full potential.

If you are interested in learning more about Will Felps work, listen to this recording from the “This American Life” show. It’s an absorbing interview with Felps.

“Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.” – Simon Sinek

If your employees were all volunteers, would they still follow you, or would they up and leave? The days of leading from position are long-gone – it’s not enough to have title, rank or authority as a platform to lead. As the battle for talent takes center stage in this digital age, leaders have to actively grow and intentionally practice their leadership skills if they are to thrive and succeed. A good test for this is to ask yourself, would your team follow you if they didn’t have to?

It goes without saying, that in order to be a leader, you have to have followers – A leader has followers if they truly believe that their leader has their best interests at heart. For this to happen, employees have to feel safe to be who they truly are. Then, and only then, will they trust, follow and fully throw themselves into their leader’s cause. This is true follower-ship.

With disruption in technology today, there is also an exponential rise of confusion within leaders, many of whom find it difficult to connect with a changing digital workforce. This culture can be impatient, fast paced, ever-changing, experimentation driven and information rich. While this could be mistaken as the millennial effect, a recent Forbes article which surveyed leading millennials, gives us an insight that regardless of generation and environment, common sense leadership principles prevailed.

The article captures four key principles to leading millennials:

Empower your team
Think long term
Acknowledge what they do
Treat them as individuals

What is interesting is that the principles above aren’t at all unique to the environment or types of employees being led. Distilled to its core, the type of leadership required in a digital organization is simply genuine leadership. Despite the changing times, the core skills of leadership have not changed. Employees will follow leaders who have their interests at heart, understand them as individuals and sometimes even make decisions at their cost.

What we see is a rise in employees who are hyper-sensitive to genuine leadership. We often hear employees don’t leave organizations, they leave managers. This couldn’t be more true. It is this that showcases the vital role genuine leadership plays when finding and retaining great talent, which can make or break your organization.

So what makes a Genuine Leader? Here are four characteristics to reflect on,

Genuine Leaders take time to understand the individual as a whole

So much of who we are, how we think and behave is shaped by our past experience and how we have grown up. A conversation I had with my CEO recently went like this:

“Hearing how you grew up in Singapore and the environment there, helped me understand how you make decisions and what you are influenced and shaped by”

It’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on the tasks at hand, simply working through what needs to be done with employees. The problem with this is that when conflict arises, most of the time it’s due to individuals looking at a situation through different perspectives. Their perspectives are shaped by who they are, and we often don’t take time to understand those who we lead fully, in order to stand in their shoes and see their perspective.

How often have you been in the situation where you can’t seem to get through to someone and no matter how many times you try, they just don’t seem to be on the same page? In these situations, we can be tempted to resort to leading with authority out of frustration.

Take time to understand individuals as a whole – we expect them to bring their whole selves to work, so why not take the time to know them as a whole?

Genuine Leaders are front-stage and back-stage leaders

It’s easy to spot leaders who aren’t genuinely for the individuals in their team. In front of an audience, they say and do the right things, but behind the scenes when the individual isn’t there, their actions reflect different intentions.

Being a leader is not about prestige, nor should it be a status symbol – simply put, leadership is a choice, and that choice comes with a weight of responsibility. Individuals that follow you believe you will create a safe environment for them, and have a desire to add value to add to them. When leaders see their job at hand as a weighted burden, their perspective changes from “How can I get Bob to do what I want him to do”, to “How do I help Mary be the best she can be”.

When leaders adopt that kind of mindset, their actions naturally reflect that positive intent regardless whether they are in front of a stage, or whether they are working behind the scenes.

Genuine Leaders understand that people learn at their individual pace

Giving feedback is an important part of leadership. People should never be uncertain of how they are performing, good or bad. At General Electric a culture of candor was an important part of who they were, so much so that if you saw your manager in the bathroom, it would be normal to have a quick chat around performance and progress. It was not seen as a formal thing that happened once a year, rather something natural that represented who they are.

That said – giving effective feedback is a skill, and sometimes giving direct feedback too early can rob individuals from getting true value out it. In my time leading, I’ve found that the timing of giving feedback is just as important as giving the feedback itself. Sometimes the time-pressures of a day leads leaders into feeling that giving feedback is a task to tick off. Genuine leaders take time to understand the growth journey of an individual, and understand that individuals might not change immediately not because they don’t respect or want to listen to your feedback, but simply because change is hard!

This is where understanding the individual as a whole is so important – sometimes coaching over a longer period of time is much more effective, and you’ll find that when the individual realizes their blind spot, they end up “getting it”, being a bit embarrassed, and become exponentially more committed to real change.

Genuine Leaders give context, understanding that why is more important than what

I’ve seen leaders fixated on the “what” – a decision or outcome that they want their teams to buy into, and forgetting to communicate the “why”. When we are focused on the outcome, we tend to focus on the “what”, but when we focus on leading the individual, we take a more holistic view and focus on “why”.

This is why conversations are often more important than the actual outcome. Two leaders deliver the same message, with totally different responses – one with high-performers in their team feeling demotivated, and the other who created buy-in and support from employees. Whether it be policies, constraints to work within, or simply a difficult task at hand, genuine leaders who focus on leading the individual naturally focus on the “why” and not the “what”.

If you are leading from a place of authority of position, it’s likely you’re communicating “what” you want employees to do. The next time you are struggling to get buy-in, take a step back and reflect on the conversation. Try leading with “why” before giving direction and keep your focus on genuinely leading the individual.

In a time where more and more buzz words are being created to tackle the fast changing nature of adapting to a rise in being digital, it’s important for us to understand that leading in a digital culture isn’t all that digital.

Whilst new digital tools may aid us, nothing beats genuine, authentic and real leadership.