According to research described in “How Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel (1)”, the worst team member’s performance is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn’t matter how great the best member of a team performs or how efficient the leader of a group. Teams perform at or near the level of their weakest member.
If full group engagement or team cooperation is expected, then the person with more difficulty cooperating with others will slow group performance. Teams overwhelmingly perform as their members behave. Even one bad apple can not only spoil, but destroy the barrel.
The worst case of passive-aggressive behavior involves destructive attitudes such as negativity, sullenness, resentment, procrastination, “forgetting” to do something, chronic lateness, and intentional inefficiency.
When it involves promising to do tasks others rely on — purposefully not getting them done and offering lame excuses later then portray their behavior as non intentional – it’s exasperating for the manager. Time, energy, effort, opportunity, and sometime money is lost.
In cases where some work is actually done, it may be delivered too late to be useful (e.g., “You needed this for the meeting at nine? I thought you said for the meeting at noon!”), may be performed in a way that makes it useless (e.g., “You wanted the stats for ‘06? I thought you said the stats for ‘96!”), or it may be sabotaged in any number of other ways.
This creates a paranoid team or workgroup environment — workers need to be always on the look out for “backstabbing behavior,” so they can defend themselves and preserve the quality of their own work.
In an optimal organization you find efficient high-performing teams. Great team performance depends on trust, cooperation, communication, and employeesÂ’ high level of personal responsibility.
Today’s stressful environment makes nurturing high performing teams difficult. Why? Because growing unemployment is resulting in employees working with people they otherwise may not choose to associate. The workforce is stagnant.
Financial insecurity is adding heavy pressure to the workplace. To survive, individuals resort to strategies such as doubling their productivity and making themselves indispensable; while other employees buckle under stress, get burned out and end up performing below their abilities.
