The impact of team moral disengagement composition on team performance: the roles of team cooperation, team interpersonal deviance, and collective extraversion

In the past few decades, significant research has accumulated on the importance of moral disengagement (Bandura, American Psychologist, 44, 1175–1184, 1989) for understanding why individuals engage in misconduct. The current research extends this work by exploring the implications of moral disengagement at the team level. Specifically, we examine how and under what conditions composing teams with morally disengaging members (i.e., team moral disengagement composition) affects team performance. In a time-lagged study of newly formed teams (N = 94), we show that team moral disengagement composition is positively associated with team-level interpersonal deviance and negatively related to team cooperation and team performance. We further show that team moral disengagement composition adversely affects team performance primarily through (low) team cooperation. However, this negative, indirect effect dissipates in teams that exhibit strong (versus weaker) collective extraversion—an emergent state that captures team sociability norms and behavioral regularities indicative of positive social interaction among team members. We discuss the implications of our findings for moral disengagement theory in team contexts.