A recent study led by European researcher Benjamin Walker shows that if just one member of a group has negative personality traits, it can drastically affect the team's performance, Express reports.

In order to arrive at this conclusion, researchers divided 158 undergraduate students into teams of four or five and asked them to complete tasks that required the effort of all members of the group. Then, each participant was asked to take a personality test, the news outlet reports.

The teams with one or more people who had negative traits, as indicated by their personality test, performed poorly compared to the groups who did not have individuals with these characteristics. According to the researchers, these negative traits included laziness and selfishness.

When people work in groups, they can be divided into three categories based on their personalities, Robert Kurzban, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania told Innovations Report. Some members will be cooperators, who tend to do the most work, while others will be free riders, who do the least work. However, most people are reciprocators, which means that they hold back on doing a lot of work until they ensure that the project will be successful.