Groups and teams: a review of bad apple behavior

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this conceptual paper is to broaden the understanding of the three negative member (bad apple) behaviors – withholding of effort, interpersonal deviance and negative affect – put forth by Felps et al. (2006). Design/methodology/approach An integrative review of extant literature was conducted to understand the impact of the negative member behaviors on other team members. Potential interventions to control this bad apple behavior are identified with supporting evidence from recent empirical studies. Findings A review of empirical findings in the literature indicate that perceived coworker loafing may lead to counterproductive work behavior toward coworkers and interpersonal deviance may affect the task cohesion of the group. However, the presence of affectively negative individuals is empirically proven to improve the group performance, especially when the group task is related to creativity or information processing (decision-making and idea generation). Originality/value Despite the empirical attention paid to “bad apple” behaviors, the implications for managing negative member behaviors are unclear and scattered. In this paper, building on the framework proposed by Felps et al. (2006), the authors focus on three behaviors and provide a concise review of literature and interventions to control or exploit these behaviors.

The Effect of Emotional Intelligence of Operational Team Leaders on the Performance of Team Members

“…The results of the study indicate that there is a statistically significant effect of empathy, motivation, and social skills on the task performance, indicating that the use of managers and officials in the industrial companies operating in Jordan of empathy with employees at work and increasing their motivation through financial and nonfinancial motives, as well as focusing on social skills, will lead to enhancing employees' performance of their tasks. The results of this study are in agreement with those of Amundson (2003), Goleman et al (2002), Jaikumar and Mendonca (2017), Wageman (2012), and Wong and Law (2002), while the self-awareness and self-regulation dimensions have no statistically significant effect on task performance. The results also indicate a statistically significant effect of the motivation and social skills dimensions on the contextual performance, while the self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation dimensions have no statistically significant effect on contextual performance according to the study tool respondents' opinion.…”

“…The results of this study are consistent with what Amundson (2003), Goleman et al (2002), Jaikumar and Mendonca (2017), Wageman (2012), and Wong and Law (2002) have stated. The benefit of emotional intelligence and the need to develop it can be summarized as follows: It is important to recognize that an operational team leader or a supervisor with a high level of emotional intelligence has a positive effect on the work environment, being a source of energy.…”

“…Felps, Mitchell & Byington (2006) defined bad behavior as any behavior that has a detrimental effect on other team members and also on overall group performance. Jaikumar and Mendonca (2017) argued that a negative member can have damaging effects on group performance. Therefore, identifying the individual's negative behaviors will help identify different outcomes at the individual, group, and organization levels.…”

Examining the within‐person effects of abusive supervision on multifoci deviance: Ethical climate as a moderator

“…Examples include intentionally mistreating customers, ridiculing customers, and/or “bad mouthing” customers in their presence or absence (Darrat et al., 2017). As stated above, deviant behaviors can have different targets (Jaikumar & Mendonca, 2017). In the current study, we group such behaviors into organization‐, supervisor‐, coworker‐ and customer‐directed deviant behaviors.…”

“…If an employee experiences repeated nonphysical abuse from their supervisor, they may partially attribute such behavior to the organization (Caesens et al., 2019) because supervisors’ behavior represents the interests of the organization, and the organization has the obligation and power to prevent abusive supervisory behavior (Sulea et al., 2013). According to retaliation theory, when employees hold their organization accountable for their agents’ actions, the victims may exhibit deviant behaviors targeting the organization (Jaikumar & Mendonca, 2017; Wu et al., 2020), as in the perception of employees, the interests of supervisors and organizations highly overlap, rendering retaliation against the organization indistinguishable from retaliation against the supervisor (Valle et al., 2018). Thus, organization‐directed deviance can be viewed as an indirect form of retaliation (Park et al., 2019).…”