Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, confirms a long-attested adage about workplace collaboration: a bad apple can spoil the bunch. Felps has conducted studies in which actors playing “bad apples” would join collaborative teams, and noted a tendency of the other team members to “spoil” within 45 minutes.
Listen to “Ruining it for the Rest of Us: Prologue,” This American Life, Dec. 19, 2008.
