Can that colleague who always stands by and does nothing ruin the whole team? -36Kr

A study of 300 project teams and 1,571 members in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that more non-helping members usually hurt team processes and performance.

However, the negative impact weakens when leaders or most members show strong helping motivation: they both want to help and feel responsible to help.

In some cases, a small number of non-helpers can even trigger stronger cooperative responses from the rest of the team.

The findings suggest that mutual-help norms from leaders and members can buffer, and sometimes offset, the damage caused by low-helping teammates.