How much a negative colleague affects the team depends on several variables: intensity, interdependence, how much the result matters, and how the team handles the negative colleague. So to judge whether the team can absorb a negative colleague, you should ask these questions:

How intense is the negative colleague?
The intensity of a negative colleague is about how negative the person is, and how often it happens (Ajzen, 2001). The effect of a negative colleague varies hugely: are there daily clashes, or does it happen once a month? Then it’s also about the scale of the clashes. Does the colleague coast along now and then, or does it happen weekly? Is it only in a few situations that the team’s norms aren’t respected, or is it outright sabotage of the team? Intensity also has to be seen against how long it’s been going on. Members can develop a kind of social allergy towards the negative colleague. After a certain dose, they become hypersensitive very fast, and then it takes nothing at all to provoke a reaction.

How dependent are the members on each other?
The more the members depend on each other to get their tasks done, the bigger the consequence of a negative colleague. For a team with high interdependence, it’s hard to avoid a negative colleague, because the tasks require everyone to interact with each other. It can be compared to a relationship. Here an old rule of thumb says that for every negative interaction a couple has, it takes five positive interactions to restore the balance (Gottman, 1995). If the team has to talk together every day, it’s almost impossible to restore the balance with five positive interactions for every negative one. Lots of interactions require the members to have good social relationships when they coordinate their activities with each other.

How important is the result to the team?
Colleagues facing an important task will react strongly to a negative colleague, unlike when the task is less important. A sales department can perhaps absorb a negative colleague who drags a single month’s revenue down. But if the negative colleague drags the department’s half-year result down, the reaction from the rest of the team will most likely be very different. It depends on what’s at stake for the team.

How good are the members at handling the negative colleague?
Finally, a negative colleague’s influence on the team also depends on how the individual members handle their negative colleague. If the members feel they have a say in their work and aren’t controlled by circumstances, they will generally be less vulnerable to a negative colleague (Erez, 2001). Team members with high self-worth recognise their own worth and know they’ll get their needs met in the teamwork despite having a negative colleague. Team members with a strong belief in their own abilities will be less affected by a negative colleague, because they trust that the situation will work out.

It’s hard to say which variables affect the team most. A team that handles a negative colleague well will be better able to absorb a high intensity. But if the team has to work together in a busy emergency room, the team will still be heavily affected by a negative colleague who doesn’t carry their share of the task.

An old rule of thumb says that for every negative interaction a couple has, it takes five positive interactions to restore the balance.

6. How does a negative colleague rub off on the rest of the team?

How fast the rest of the team catches it from a negative colleague becomes clear when we look at how the negative colleague spreads it. It can happen by the colleague talking directly to you, by you displacing your frustrations onto someone else, and by you talking to others to make sense of what happened. It’s not an either/or — it’s that the spread happens almost like a chain reaction.

Direct confrontation: the negative colleague talks to you
The most obvious way the team catches it from a negative team member is when the person talks to the others. When two people talk together and one of them is negative, the mood will rub off.
The popcorn effect: your frustrations land on a third colleague
Another way a negative colleague spreads it is like ripples in water. The negative colleague affects someone else, who displaces their frustrations. They’re displaced by letting the frustrations land on a third colleague who has nothing to do with the matter at all. It’s a kind of popcorn effect, where the inhibitions about how you express yourself slowly but surely disappear (Robinson, 1998).
“Sensemaking”: you make sense of it with others
Finally, the negative mood spreads because we need to make sense of the situation with the negative colleague. In English this is called “sensemaking”. After a confrontation with a negative colleague, we need to share the experience with a third person. Research shows that more than 90 % tell a third person when they’ve been treated badly. After that, around 75 % pass this story on to a fourth party (Porath, 2012).

If the team has tried in vain to change the negative colleague’s behaviour, the individual members will start to question their own attachment to the team. That happens especially when there are no longer clear norms for how to behave on the team. It also happens when the team struggles to work together and doesn’t reach its goals. Here the individual members start to see themselves as individuals rather than as a team, which makes the overall engagement drop.

An employee who quits because of a lack of engagement is therefore likely a sign of generally low engagement, if the team also has a negative colleague on board.

Research shows that more than 90 % tell a third person when they’ve been treated badly. After that, around 75 % pass this story on to a fourth party.

7. What are the marks of a negative team?

An effective team needs two overall competencies. The first competency is that the members must be able to produce individually. The second competency requires the members to be able to coordinate and integrate their individual actions into the overall result.

To be able to produce individually, the individual must be motivated, suited to the job, and able to learn and adapt. The second competency requires the individual to be able to take part in constructive conflict and teamwork (Smith, 1994). A negative colleague holds back both of these overall competencies, which is why the team is certain to fail.

Five marks that you’ve ended up on a negative team:

The team is demotivated and sets goals that are too low
Motivated teams are ambitious and tend to set goals that are too high. Demotivated teams do the opposite. Their goals are often too low (Mitchell, 1997).
The team has no creativity
A central part of a team’s work lies in coming up with creative solutions to problems. But this creativity is only released if ideas can be exchanged freely, if the team believes it can be innovative, and if the team is motivated to create something new. That requires psychological safety, which is why negative teams aren’t creative (Camacho, 1995).
The team members don’t work together
Another mark of a negative team is that the members don’t work together. They usually don’t, because the trust is gone. The team doesn’t believe that an agreement is an agreement. People may distrust the others for taking credit for their work, or experience being talked about behind their back. When the trust is gone, the members see themselves as individuals rather than as one team. So they typically act selfishly and to their own advantage (Kramer, 1996).
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There are person-related conflicts
In teams it’s important to tell the difference between person-related conflicts and task-related conflicts. Task-related conflicts can often be constructive for the team, unlike person-related conflicts. Person-related conflicts can arise when a colleague is irritable, condescending or humourless (Furr, 1998). That brings more friction to the team, which creates even more conflicts. Person-related conflicts therefore often make the members withdraw, so the team doesn’t resolve the task-related conflicts.
The team generally performs poorly
The result of a negative team can be seen on every qualitative and quantitative measure. The team’s performance will be poor, the happiness at work and the engagement will be low, and the team will quickly fall apart. A team can fall apart by losing many or all of its members. A negative team will work itself down into a downward spiral.

Person-related conflicts often make the members withdraw, so the team doesn’t resolve the task-related conflicts.

If you step into a new team where there are long-standing members, you should be on your guard. As a rule of thumb, a new team is marked by around a third of the members being new. That means there could still potentially be a negative colleague creating a negative team. The most skilled colleagues are the most mobile, because it’s easiest for them to find work elsewhere. So they’re usually the ones who leave the negative team first. If that’s the case, it could be a sign that the manager hasn’t been able to solve the problem. So ask the following questions before you join the team:

What was the mood like in the old team?
Why have former members left the team?
How missed are those who have left the old team?

If you get the feeling that there’s a negative colleague on the team, my clear recommendation is that you say no thank you — no matter how hungry you are for the job.

One bad egg ruins the whole cake

In the first part of my article I described how a team in a defensive position is dysfunctional. When the members defend themselves against the negative colleague, it typically shows up in behaviour like an explosive temper, revenge, mood swings, getting distracted, denial and withdrawal. The more negative the colleague is, the more the team depends on each other’s teamwork, or the more there is at stake for the team, the more often you’ll see these flare-ups.

Every time we meet these flare-ups, we need — for the sake of our mental health — to share the experiences with others. If the flare-ups continue, our tolerance for our negative colleague drops, and we let our frustrations land on entirely different colleagues. The team’s fuse gets shorter, because the negative colleague ruins the whole cake. The consequence is a negative team that sets goals that are too low, lacks creativity, where no learning happens, and where the general wellbeing drops.

If you get the feeling that there’s a negative colleague on the team, my clear recommendation is that you say no thank you — no matter how hungry you are for the job.

Performance drops too, but in practice what I see is that it happens last of all. That’s because we’re often so loyal to our workplace that we put in evenings and weekends to make up for a negative colleague’s missing contribution. So maybe it’s less about whether the team can perform with a negative colleague. Maybe the question is what it costs the team to have to make up for a negative colleague. Do we reach our goals with the taste of blood in our mouths, a long-term sick leave or a resignation?

You could say it isn’t the work, but the working together, that creates the stress.

In part 3/3 you’ll find out:

8. What mistakes do we often make when we judge a negative colleague?

9. What can you do as a colleague?

10. What can you do as a manager?

Sources

Nature and Operation of Attitudes

Ajzen, 2001, Annual Review of Psychology

Why Marriages Succeed or Fail

Gottman, 1995, Simon & Schuster

Relationship of Core Self-Evaluations to Goal Setting, Motivation, and Performance

Erez, 2001, Journal of Applied Psychology