Study: Bad team members make other team members worse
 

It was the subject of a lecture in class.

There's a link to the big formal journal article later in the power point notes.

When we were covering the bit about how other team members respond to bad apples Fifthfiend leapt to mind - from the way he talks about work I'm pretty sure somewhere at his company is the worst apple ever.

It makes sense that they screw everyone else up, but sometimes, it's the other way around: Bad members stay like that, but the good ones end up doing more than said bad members would do.

Example: In high school every group assignment I had ended up with me and another guy doing all the work and two other guys doing absolutely nothing. Always. This was less a case of them being lazy and more a case of them being terrible with mostly everything. They passed mostly because of us. Okay, they didn't learn what they should've learnt, yes, but...Um... Well, both ended up joining a band and highschool stuff ain't so important now.

Team exercises are stupid. You just need an end goal and enough competent professionals to achieve it. So long as everyone espouses some very basic ideas of professionalism (often times enforced by corporate policy) the shit gets done, or people get fired.

You'd THINK this is how stuff works, but honestly, it's not. There are informal power structures all over the workplace that can mean a bad worker stays put for effectively forever. The higher-ups tend not to care who does the work so long as it gets done, so as long as everyone picks up the slack, a person can do essentially nothing. On top of that, if a person knows people, they can use it to stay put or even pass the blame off on other people who don't have that benefit. Basically, unless a person is directly a liability to the company or causes actual trouble that can't be ignored, they stay right where they are.

I like team exercises. But i usually end up leading... But it's great to bounce ideas out of people and get input. On complex jobs it's nice to soften the load, and on simplier ones you can actually improve your work by being open to ideas, even if they just end up giving you inspiration to come up with your own new ideas.

In the end, at least for me, the best way to work as a team is to find someone's strong suit (there is always one) and send them that way. If 2 people are weak on the assignment, make them work together on just one thing, better if it's not a central part of your work. And everybody else just gets their assignment and run off to get it done.

This usually works pretty well and it's nice to make everyone be a part of something.

Also, it's pretty easy to end up on a group of people who have trouble speaking seriously in fron of a class or their teachers... that's why some of my best (and more complex) works get done in video

I'm actually working on one right now about Respiratory Safety. We usually do stuff that is funny and unusual. If the teacher hasn't forbidden this kind of approach and if the content is right and present, they can't give us a bad grade for trying to be creative and taking a novel approach.

That's how we ended up doing a Slipknot cover (Before i Forget) for which i'm making a videoclip full of Images and text about Respiratory Safety.