Infective Team Dynamics
Your business is run by teams. Now, more than ever, you have to be sensitive to team killers – the one or two individuals that drag a high quality group of people into the mud. We’ve all dealt with them. The individual who just seems to be in the way, not pulling his weight or simply a jerk. Some interesting research by Dr. William Felps, Rotterdam School of Management, indicates that team effectiveness can be reduced by 30% to 40% through the simple addition of a single ‘bad apple.’ He describes his research in a recent episode of This American Life and had it published in the 2006 journal, Research in Organizational Behavior, Volume 27, 181–230. Bad apples were described as jerks, slackers and depressive pessimists. I really enjoy the inventiveness of the experiment.