The Bad Apple Effect
Today’s Read Time: 2.83 minutes
This week, I’m leading a breakout session at the Central Illinois Human Resources Conference. The title? Toxic Teams and Drama Queens.
If you’ve ever had to manage a team, you already know why that session fills up fast.
Because most of the time, conflict in the workplace isn’t some big blowout. It’s one person. One person who drains the energy out of a meeting. One person who makes others second-guess themselves. One person who throws off the balance of an otherwise solid team.
We’ve all seen it. We’ve all tried to manage around it. And it turns out, there is some research that likely supports your hunch about bad apples.
The Study Every Leader Needs to Know About
A few years ago, researchers at the University of Washington set up a lab experiment to measure how much one bad attitude affects group performance.
They brought people in to work on a simple task in groups of four. What the participants didn’t know? One of the four wasn’t just a team member. He was an actor planted by the researchers to play a role.
For 45 minutes, that actor took on one of three characters:
The jerk: condescending, sarcastic, and dismissive
The slacker: disengaged, doing the bare minimum
The downer: anxious, negative, constantly doubting the group
It’s reasonable to suspect that a bad apple will have a negative effect but I was shocked to learn that teams with a bad apple performed 30 to 40 percent worse than teams without one. Same task. Same time. All it took was one bad apple to tank the team’s results.
The really wild part? The behavior spread. The other “good” teammates started mimicking the bad apple. Even when they didn’t realize they were doing it. Their patience got shorter with each other, tones more defensive and the team energy was less focused.
It’s like the emotional equivalent of secondhand smoke. You might not light the match, but you still breathe it in.
What Makes Someone a Bad Apple
This part matters. Because not every tough personality is toxic. Here’s what the study identified as the biggest red flags:
People who withhold effort
People who consistently bring emotional negativity
People who stir the pot—passive aggression, sarcasm, manipulation
These behaviors don’t have to be loud to do damage. Some of the most disruptive employees are quietly cynical or consistently disengaged. But when you’re leading a team, those little shifts have ripple effects. People start holding back which diminishes productivity drops. When communication is guarded in self-preservation, creativity and morale take a hit. Before long, the team you built doesn’t feel like a team at all.
So What Do You Do About It?
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But I am going to say it clearly: If one person is consistently bringing your team down, you have to address it.
It might be a coaching opportunity. Sometimes people don’t realize how their behavior affects others. Sometimes they’re open to feedback and willing to course correct. And sometimes they’re not.
I know it’s hard to think about letting go of someone who gets results. But if they get results and wreck the team while doing it, they’re not actually helping you. A high performer with a bad attitude still costs you- at a rate impacting overall team performance by 30%, conservatively.
So you coach. You set boundaries. You give clear expectations. But if the behavior doesn’t change, you have to make the decision to cut the rot. Because that’s what it is. Rot.
What I’ve Learned
We help organizations make hard calls like this all the time. We help name the behavior, guide the conversation, support the repair work that comes after. Sometimes the bad apple goes. Sometimes they stay, but the behavior doesn’t.
Either way, leadership means doing the hard thing for the right reason.
You don’t have to live with dysfunction. You don’t have to explain away the impact of someone who makes your team smaller, not stronger. You don’t have to wait until one bad apple spoils the bunch.
Want support navigating conflict on your team? We don’t shy away from hard conversations—and neither should you. Reach out if you’re ready to talk.