Cheating, fraud, theft—unethical behaviour hurts firms and also other workers. Resentment brews. When the team’s social climate is gloomy, creative tasks take a hit.
We tend to think of unethical behaviour as a whole. What is lesser known is that its distribution within a team—whether there’s just one bad apple or different levels of cheating among many team members—makes a difference.
In a paper recently published in the journal Personnel Psychology, my co-authors and I explained how cheating configurations affect team creative performance.
Surveying close to 100 work teams from different industries in China, the researchers analysed team relationship conflict and team creative performance. We also investigated how much participants perceived their economic rewards, e.g. salaries or bonuses, to be dependent on teammates’ inputs.
There are two types of cheating prevalence. In the “bad apple” team, only a few people show frequent cheating behaviour and the rest are honest. In the “fragmented” team, many members cheat but to different extents. After controlling for team size and how long members worked together in the team, the researchers found that when people keenly feel that their rewards are dependent on teammates’ inputs, bad apples have a lesser harmful effect on relationship conflict and creative performance. However, the same does not apply to the “fragmented” teams.
Increasingly, firms are switching from the traditional appraisal-by-boss system to one where reward decisions are influenced by peer assessment. The researchers provided evidence regarding the benefits of this emerging peer assessment practice—they reduce the harmful outcomes of “bad apples” on the team. This works better in a “bad apple team” rather than a “fragmented team”, and managers would do well to consider how individual member cheating is patterned in their teams, rather than focusing on unethical behaviour in the team as a whole.