Why Interpersonal Counterproductive Work Behavior Comes in Clumps (And What That Means for Your Team)
Updated: Jun 3
Ever notice that interpersonal counterproductive work behaviors rarely come in isolation? (Phew! That was a mouthful, but no less true for it.)
It is simply true that it is rarely just one team member who is passive aggressive, or late on deadlines, or psychologically checked out. Whole teams of employees, departments, sometimes even entire companies will consistently exhibit these behaviors.
Think of… Well, I don’t want to call anyone out. Just think of a large company where you've had multiple experiences and everyone there seems to be a jerk. Maybe you go there for your car or something.
We tend to call that company culture. Tendencies in one direction or another, negative and positive. Amazon is frugal and efficient, Apple values personal freedom, Ikea loves meatballs. But why do these tendencies, especially the counterproductive ones, take root?
Maybe a similar phenomenon in improv can shed some light? In fact, I’m fairly certain that it can. With your permission, I’d like to share a common occurrence in a very simple improv warmup game with you.
In this game one player passes focus to another by initiating a clapping motion and then clapping simultaneously with the other player. Played in a circle, the game starts by passing focus in one direction through a series of simultaneous claps, until focus returns to whichever player made the first pass and a full loop is completed.
Things typically advance to the game’s second level pretty quickly, and that’s when a very interesting pattern of behavior becomes apparent. At this stage players are no longer forced to pass in just one direction and are now allowed to pass focus back to whoever passed it to them. Players won’t typically make this choice at first, but in an average size class of 8-16, eventually, someone does.
And that often kicks off a deluge.
A passes to B, B to C, C to D. So far so good. But now D passes back to C. Flustered, C passes back to D. Shocked the thing they just did to C has suddenly been done to them, D quickly passes to E, but it's too late. The group now has the taste for man blood, so E passes back to D.
True terror may flash across D’s face as they turn to pass back to C again. Then C to D, D to E, E to D, D to C, and so on.
A bad situation, no doubt, and only eclipsed by the dreaded C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to E (there’s hope!), E to D (false hope), D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, C to D, D to C, picking up speed all the while until no one in the room really knows who is passing to who anymore, only that perpetual disagreement has been attained.
Sound familiar? If not, imagine for a moment that C and D aren’t passing focus, but instead blame. I bet it rings a bell now.
Turns out that the central act of this simple improv game, passing focus to another, creates performance anxiety. So it feels good when you pass it off to someone else and bad when it comes right back to you.
Note that the payback starts immediately. It isn’t that one toxic person keeps passing focus back to the same person, again and again, until that person can’t take it anymore and decides to retaliate. Just one infraction is enough.
The second one player plays another dirty, they will be paid back in spades! So much so it becomes the defining feature of the entire exercise.
Now you might wonder how I know players interpret immediately receiving focus back as an unfriendly act. I know because I have led this exercise hundreds if not thousands of times and I ask how it feels. The answer is almost always the same: It feels bad.
Often people will have to think for a moment before coming to that realization. They aren’t consciously aware they didn’t like it, but this lack of conscious knowledge in no way diminishes the likelihood of them repeating the behavior and thus cementing in a thorny, intractable problem.
This phenomenon in improv is hardly limited to The Clapping Game.
In my art form there is one big cardinal sin: negations. That means saying no to your scene partner’s suggestions. In fact negations are the reason that improv pioneer Ted Flicker developed the famous motto, Yes And.
Negations are a big no no in improv and I have noticed something about them after years of immersion in the art form: they rarely arrive alone.
A scene can go two full minutes without a single negation. Everyone is Yes Anding, the scene has momentum, things are clicking….
Then one person negates.
And just like they do in The Clapping Game, once a negation arrives the improvisers will repeat the behavior without end. This dynamic results in dialogue like:
A: I made spaghetti for dinner, you’re favorite.
B: I hate spaghetti!
A: You never told me that!
B: It’s common knowledge!
A: How could something so stupid be common knowledge about you?
B: Everyone knows! Ask anyone!
A: Well, I’m your husband and I don’t know!
And on and on. Even experienced improvisers with years of training in Yes And frequently fall into this trap. A scene killer.
Just like the earlier example, it happens instantaneously, does not require a conscious decision, and begins with a move we regard as unfriendly. A correction, a contradiction, a negation.
It is the Hatfields and McCoys, or Romeo and Juliet on fast forward. By the time the kids can't date each other, nobody on either side can even remember what started the whole feud. What began as one moment of friction becomes a self-sustaining cycle of retaliation so automatic that the original offense has been completely forgotten.
Improv has no shortage of guidelines similar to Yes And. For example, improvisers are taught not to ask questions, to play their scenes at the top of their intelligence, and to avoid making accusations.
Guess what?
If one player breaks any of those guidelines there is a very good chance their scene partner will do the same. As before, it happens instantly, unconsciously, starts with a moment perceived as unfriendly and continues on and on.
It is comforting to imagine it is just a coincidence. But it isn’t. It is a pattern of instinctual behavior, and understanding its dynamics and how to interrupt them might be one of the more useful things an improviser (or a manager) can learn.
Because I promise, if this happens among artists working in collaboration, then it happens among professional coworkers too. If you work with other people (which, if you are reading a corporate team building blog, there is a reasonable chance you do) you have seen this pattern. You just might not have noticed it or had a name for it.
Think about a meeting where one person dismisses someone else's idea without much consideration. What happens next?
Odds are strong that the person whose idea was dismissed will do the same thing to someone else before long. In short order, it happens again. Before you know it your office will have a different energy than it had before that meeting. Often nobody can quite put their finger on why.
Because unfriendly, unsupportive behaviors can easily camouflage themselves as good business practice, sharp thinking or just being realistic. And hey, sometimes they probably are those things too. Two things can be true at once, the saying goes.
Small comfort once the whole team has descended into dysfunction.
Think about a team where one person has gotten into the habit of going around a colleague rather than working with them. The colleague notices. Maybe they don't say anything. But they start doing it back, and then both of them are routing around each other, and now there are two separate workflows on a team that is supposed to be coordinated.
Or credit-claiming. One person presents a shared project as their own work. Someone on that team will, eventually, do the same thing. Not necessarily to the same person. But the norm has shifted, and now self-protection is the default.
These are not just personality conflicts, removing someone won’t solve the problem. It is a loop, a culture. It can and will survive on its own.
So now that we’ve identified this tendency, what do you actually do about it? Mind you, I never said I could solve all these pesky counterproductive behaviors, and there well may be no one solution. Still, improv can offer some unique strategies.
The key insight from organizational psychology is that most counterproductive work behavior isn't purely dispositional (it isn't just that someone is a bad person). It is situational. The loop feeds itself.
Which means changing the dynamic is usually more doable than you might expect, certainly more doable than trying to change the individual. It boils down to interrupting and then changing the nature of the loop.
Improv figured this out a long time ago.
In improv, one of the most reliable ways to break a negative loop is what I'd call the Yes And redirect. Here's an example.
Say someone starts a scene with an accusation (a no-no):
"You broke my toaster."
A less experienced improviser might get defensive or fight back. A skilled one absorbs it and redirects:
"I did break your toaster, I'm worried you're eating too many carbs and I wanted to make carbs less attractive to you."
Notice what just happened. The accusation was accepted on the surface, but the meaning was completely reframed. A stupid, careless act became the intentional strategy of a caregiver. A closing move became an opening one.
You can do a version of this at work when someone reflexively dismisses an idea. Instead of defending the idea, try absorbing their frame and redirecting it:
"You're right that moving the photocopier to the south wing won’t work. All the people who use it most are in the north wing. It is a brilliant observation and not the only example of inefficiencies stemming from our floor plan! Moving the photocopier can kick off an opportunity to correct all of those inefficiencies if we tie it to a larger layout redo.
Or, a bit more open ended, we invite the dismisser to collaborate:
"Okay, it doesn't work. What's the closest version that does?"
You're not arguing with the dismisser. You're accepting their reality and changing what it means. Their "no" becomes the raw material for a collaborative yes. The thing they were pushing against disappears, and often the resistance fades right along with it.
Suddenly we have a new loop that is just as self perpetuating as a counterproductive one, a loop of collaboration. Humans are creatures of pattern and they will follow this productive behavior loop with the same zeal they will follow a counterproductive one.
But someone has to identify the forming loop, understand it for what it is and interrupt it with a redefining act. And they have to do that while likely feeling insulted, diminished or misunderstood. It is the act of a master weaver to incorporate the mistakes of a student into the larger pattern.
In improv we train for these constantly. The discipline of Yes And isn't just a courtesy, it is a structural rule that protects the ensemble from any one person's fear or ego collapsing the performance. But professional organizations rarely have an equivalent norm, which means the burden of the redirect can feel lonely and thankless.
One skilled Yes Ander can interrupt a lot. But a whole team trained in the underlying dynamic can do much more.
Accept what's given
Change where it points
Keep building
This simple act of professional Jinjitsu makes the counterproductive behaviors progressively less enticing. Not through punishment. Through pattern.
The loop will not break itself. In improv scenes, in families, in offices, in international politics, it rarely does. Someone has to go first and offer the generous move when every instinct is telling them not to.
In improv we practice that move over and over, because it turns out to be the whole game.
And as it turns out, it is a pretty good way to run a team.
Comments