This is all common sense.
In a business, if you have a bad apple, you need to get rid of them. Quickly.
Conventional business wisdom.
I thought Rahulās comment was so brilliantly simple and insightful, that I had to compliment it.
@MacBet: The sub-prime tummyache was caused by too many good apples.
For those who complain about this comment, my first response, which follows MacBet, is that without the Bad Apple, itās just easier and faster for the group to do something Incredibly Stupid. In the world of CodingHorror, I offer up: xml, ejb, COBOL, SOA, etc. The wisdom of the group is often the admiration of the Emperorās New Clothes. Yāall remember that.
Jeff,
help draw the fine line between bad apple and constructive contrarian?
Differing points of view are valuable, but they sometimes sound pessimistic.
Guidance always appreciatedā¦
I think this study also showed the existence of a good apple effect.
I agree with @Bill that this seems somewhat obvious. If someone is being negative in a group environment, the natural and expected result is for the rest of the members of that group to put up their guard against the negativity / criticism. The effect that is decreased mental flexibility, which results in a decrease in creativity and productivity.
I think perhaps the author has drawn a somewhat improper conclusion. Actors must, by definition, have the ability to project a great deal of self-confidence (basically, persistence). Youāve mixed them in groups with Students, who, by nature, should be very open-minded (or they wonāt be able to learn).
Additionally, the actors have a degree of foreknowledge. Basically, youāve hired people to TRY to influence the status-quo of the group. Obviously, when you look hard enough for one conclusion, you will invariably find it.
Try this again with real students, real slackers, real jerks, and real WINNERS. I think that youāll find the real conclusion is that the most confident has the most profound effect on a groupās dynamic. I know that if I were put in a group with Jack Welsh, I would have a fire under my ass to perform my best. Similarly, if I had a homeless man in my group, I wouldnāt be nearly as motivated to perform as strongly, because I donāt have the added incentive of making a possibly profitable association with them. (This conclusion is based on the assumption that confident people are more valuable as associates)
Itās all about the inherent value of the situation. The more you have to gain, and the more you have fairly assessed those gains, the more you will be motivated by them.
@Matt (myself)
- Apologies for my vulgarity, I hope I havenāt offended anyone.
- When I said I think the author hasā¦, I am referring to Wil Felps, not the author of this article.
At first I thought that this was spot on, as I have certainly experienced this myself - one bad apple in the team spending half of every meeting whining about everything and such.
But Rahuls summary actually feels even more correct, as I have certainly seen the opposite as well. One very positive person, a very good apple if you will, can also affect a group. It doesnāt even have to be the leader, just any member of the team that spreads energy.
It seems though that at least within IT, there is a tendency towards the jerk personality to some extent. Cynicism, dismissive one-liners, and an inherent sense of always knowing a better way to proceed than whatever has already been agreed upon - I see this a lot more often than I see the real positive can-do, letās-go guys.
This American Life is the bomb. There is tons of good stuff there. Keep listening Jeff.
If you dip them apples in candy first, they radiate more, they become sweeter, and they stay perkier longer.
The only problem is, it makes other people want to bite them too.
Managers hate bad apples because they contradict the official BS line weāre great, the project is humming along nicely, live your lives for The Company.
Especially when times are stressful, someone who states loudly what everyone around are thinking (i.e. weāre in deep sā¦t), can have a very positive effect on the workplace atmosphere.
What happens when the bad apple is actually the right one though? Iām talking specifically about the jerk persona. Iāve worked on a lot of teams that were just a bunch of hacks trying to pretend that they were capable of being professional software developers. I was the voice of reason who actually wanted to do things the RIGHT way, but it could have been construed as being the jerk persona.
What do you in a case like this, when the jerk is actually right and the rest of the team are stupid?
If the jerk is the right one there are 2 options :
- he is the boss and he micro-manages. This will go horribly wrong unless he really is right, and capable. And, while this is better in America than elsewhere, Iāve yet to meet the first decent-level manager with any real (exact-science at least) degree. In the rest of the world, there are no managers that have decent credentials either as tradesmen or academics. Political science, MBA just donāt cut it.
- he does what heās told and walks away with a paycheck out of a project that falls apart
(and thereās obviously option 3, getting fired)
You can prevent the bad-apples from infecting others. Thatās called a strongly hierarchical organization. If done right, it can be as capable as the person at the top. If thatās a very capable guy, thatās great. If not, well ā¦
You cannot prevent bad-apples from infecting others in an equal setting, any more than you can protect people on a marketplace from suicide terror.
Of course there is also the little matter ā¦ we arenāt smarter collectively or in teams than individually. Teams can have a wider knowledge than any single team member has, but they cannot have better knowledge.
Everybody whoās seen a demonstration, or any group of people react as a group knows this. The more people, the more stupid a team becomes. Huge teams are, first and foremost, hugely dumb.
Of course, in practice this translates to a team performing significantly worse than any individual team member would on his own.
The only way to make functioning team is to have strictly disparate responsabilities : donāt have 4 coders/domain experts/analysts. Donāt have 2 coders. Have a single coder, a single analyst, a single domain expert and a single tester in a team.
America is built on the strength, and especially the smarts, of individuals. Soviet russia was built on the smarts of teams.
Soviet russia was built on the smarts of teams.
Thatās a myth. Take Russian aircraft designers, for example.
Whatās with all the Bad Apple stuff lately? This is like the second or third recent post about this. Others here have alluded this: donāt we all learn this cliche jibber jabber about bad apples when weāre seven years old or something like that? Isnāt this one of the most famous cliches ever?
What exactly is the story here? Some rather suspect study essentially confirms the conventional wisdom and this is supposed to be surprising? Not sure I see the point here. Arenāt there a million cliches about this, some already mentioned, like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and all that. I donāt know about all this sub-prime mumbo jumbo but @Macbet as one thing, this study is typical sociological pseudo science. Sociologist make so many wide claims based on so little evidence and their research programs are so weak. Karl Popper showed how Freudās psychoanalysis was unfalsifiable pseudo science and most of this kind research has the same problems. Donāt get me started on this nonsense about the The Three Personaility Types for This and Eleven Personality Types for That stuff.
In reality, people and group dynamics are much much more complicated than is revealed by this sort of stuff. Probably, the issue is far too important to be left to the sociologists.
Anyway, this is far too simplistic. I donāt think all these cliches should be used to actually analyze real problems. While a chain may be as strong as its weakest link, a group is not necessarily so. There are characteristics of groups that are not translatable to chains of links and barrels of apples. The only places where it might make sense to apply the chain analogy is where there is a group that must perform some function (probably this would need to be a rather discrete function) and the role of any member in the group (or set) is equivalent (in the mathematical sense), such as in the case of a chain (perhaps the two ending links are somewhat different, I havenāt bothered to think this through all the way, after all it is a cliche). However, this is not the case in most groups. In reality, militaries are not as strong as the weakest soldier, sports teams do not perform only as well as the weakest player, and so on and so forth. Actually, it becomes very strange to equate what it means to be a strong military or sports team with what it means to be a strong soldier or player; there is just a difference in what it means. In a chain, all that it means to be strong is that all links are Strong. As for barrels of apples, it becomes even more complicated. You have to really pay attention to what you mean by strong, weak, good, and bad.
You might say, well itās just an analogy so we arenāt trying to arrive at a perfect 1-1 translation. However, then I question how useful it is to even use such an analogy or cliche at all.
The nice thing about a scientific and logical way of thinking is that it frees you from the shackles of thinking in terms of cliches and analogies in order so that to you can begin to understand a thing precisely.
We donāt need cliches to muddy things up anymore than they already are. We certainly donāt need pseudo-studies that purport of offer surprising results by concluding that they have confirmed cliches. That is one of the silliest things Iāve heard in a long time.
I was on a team with 2 types of the bad apples. The amount of negativity that can be caused is tremendous and can result in bad team morale and low productivity.
Part of being right is to get the rest of the team along with you.
If all ways to make the sheep understand your clever masterplan fail, eventually you have to give up complaining about it and try to make the best of whatever plan you can agree on.
Otherwise you are just being a jerk, even if you happen to be right.
I also highly recommend Joelās essay how to get things done when you are just a grunt (something like that) as an answer to this. He suggests creating a bubble of excellence around yourself.
The team wonāt bother with source control? Install it locally and use it yourself. Nobody talks to the users? YOU talk to the users. Nobody writes specs? YOU write specs. No documentation? Write it! And so on.
I learned similar techniques in Leadership class to what the studyās Good Leader used.
This American Life! Itās one of my favorite shows. Here in Washington itās on KPLU every Sunday at 12:00, so Iām waiting for it to come on (in 10 minutes) while I bake some bacon and code 
The sub-prime tummyache was caused by too many good apples.
Anyway that study is hardly exhaustive, typical sociological pseudo science crap.
Are you trying to say that you donāt want to consider the possibility
that youāre a bad apple?
Iāve seen this happen, Iāve felt this happen. Iāve even felt myself becoming a depressive pessimist simply by being in the company of one.