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Yesterday I encountered another 'bad apple' – a person whose behavior is detrimental to teammates and groups (Felps et al. 2006).
“A single “bad apple” can reduce team performance by 30 – 40%. That's not a typo – one negative person can slash your team's effectiveness by nearly half” (The Leaders Guide).
“Common defensive mechanisms employees use to cope with a “bad apple” include denial, social withdrawal, anger, anxiety and fear. Trust in the team deteriorates and as the group loses its positive culture, members physically and psychologically disengage themselves from the team” (Gardner, 2007).The back story is that this person is a vicar, and a leader for one of the largest congregations in Helsingfors. And we have met before, in the fall of 2022.
I'm in Finland because of my expertise in psychology. After many years as a performance coach and educational manager in the sports industry, and after completing a degree in market analysis from a private business school, I went back to the university to answer some questions about performance anxiety and organizational learning.
The result was:
- a bachelor and a masters' degree in business administration. The prior was a case study, and the latter a quantitative study; I constructed a three-dimensional model for organizational learning.
- a bachelor degree in Experimental emotional psychology (Österberg, 2001 a), and a masters' degree in Social psychology on how kids relationships with their parents affect their executive functions. (Österberg, 2004).
When Daniel Kahneman (1934 – 2024) received the Swedish Riksbanken's Prize in Economics in memory of Alfred Nobel, I had the privilege of being recruited to do my doctorate at a department for economics and business administration (2002 – 2003). I got what I call the “Albert Bandura-treatment”, the freedom to explore whatever I wanted, as well as access to money to fund it. The other part of the assignment was to tutor established researchers and professors in methods.
In my doctoral thesis I deal with leadership that influences work climate, as well as social creativity for problem solving and innovation (Österberg, 2012, 2004).
I was assigned the task:
- of developing and implementing (lecturing) a course for future leaders and managers in academia (2005 – 2008).
- as an expert lecturer at a number of universities colleges in Sweden (n=10), as well as the University of Helsingfors (UH) (2004 – 2018). Later I was recruited to UH to become a research leader (2018 – 2021; 2022), to investigate the future of agriculture from a perspective of entrepreneurial thinking (Österberg, 2021 a).
It’s hard not to be satisfied with my accomplishments.
Because of my background as a performance coach, food has been integral and instrumental for my thinking. And in 2014, I joined a research network at Karolinska Institute, which probably motivated me to dig deeper into food and health. In 2018, I was recruited to be a research leader at the university of Helsingfors.
It eventually led to a popular science article on my science blog, where I explored the evolutionary background to our species' diet (Österberg, 2019).
And because of that approach, on January 23 2020, I was invited to open a seminar series for experts in food and nutrition at the neighboring department Food and nutrition, at the faculty of Agriculture and forest at the University of Helsingfors (Österberg, 2020 a).
I partook in conferences, and wrote more about food and health (Österberg, 2020 b, 2021, 2022, 2023 a b, 2024). I added Nutrition psychology to my signature and resumé.
In 2020, my mentor, the guy who recruited me to Finland to become a research-leader to accomplish something (for Finland), contacted me saying that Finnish media has reported that Finland has ~100 000 poor children.
The month after, Eva Roos, a nutritionist at Folkhälsan, sounded the alarm about a child-obesity epidemic in Finland. Many Finnish kids had contracted Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD).
Three years earlier, Eva Roos was involved in a study that provided a reference to the explanation itself:
“High availability of fruits and vegetables in the home did not seem to protect the children from the effect of the sugar-enriched foods” (Vepsäläinen et al. p. 1237).And the reports kept coming.
In April 2022, the Helsingfors police said that Finnish women's relational aggressiveness (psychological domestic violence; Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005) is the big issue.
In May, at a conference, a director from the ministry of education and culture said that the Pisa ranking was false – too many Finnish kids fail reading comprehension and numeracy – the ability to understand, reason with, and apply simple numerical concepts; it is the numerical counterpart of literacy (Brooks and Pui, 2010). Numeracy is the foundation for epistemic and instrumental rational thinking (Stanovich, 2011, 2016).
And in September, Li Andersson, minister of education, was interviewed, emphasizing another challenge:
“Involuntary school absence has increased in recent years and is often caused by anxiety or depression. Spotlight's review shows that only a fifth of children and young people affected by school absence have received support at school that actually helps (Söderlund, 2022).Having a conversation with me about things that has to do with how the mind works, seems to be a slam dunk – a crowd pleaser – to put it frankly.
When I met the vicar in fall 2022, he had invited people to talk about mental health issues.
Because episodic memory is not a replication but a construction adjusted for a social situation (Schacter och Addis, 2007), it's hard to pin-point all semantic details (semantic memory is stored in a different way). I'm pretty sure though that there was some food, and that we talked about the issues I mentioned about.
And because of my competence in psychology, and the fact that I was recruited from Sweden to Finland because of that competence, it made sense to approach the vicar to offer my expertise. Together, we had the potential to help many people.
But here's how both of us remembered the meeting: he rejected me in a very aggressive/hostile way, and he remained aggressive/hostile towards me in the following meetings ...
Hence, the same thing happened during our next meeting we had at the same place on January 29 2024. As I remembered it, he was even more aggressive/hostile.
Then we met for a third time, at a coffee meeting at the church where the vicar currently works, and for the third time, he was very aggressive/hostile.
When I did the work with my master's thesis in business administration about organizational learning, I started an interview series with executive leaders. That interview series continued through the work with my doctoral thesis. In total, I met with >30 managing directors (MD) or Chief executive officers (CEOs). One interesting thing was the response I received during the interviews (n>30), another interesting thing was that 40% of MD's and CEO's declined/rejected my request for an interview.
The offer was sent as an e-mail with the following content: I'm a leadership researcher. I request an interview. We can meet for lunch, which I will pay for, and I promise to leave after one hour.
Why did the MD's and CEO's reject an offer from a leadership researcher?
The answer eventually came through the mainstream media, and it was all negative news; something bad that had happened to the company, or that the MD/CEO had been fired.
Contrary to a physical injury, which typically motivates us to ask for help, when it comes to psychological oriented issues, like mental health issues and/or organizational crises, we typically go hiding in the closet and hope the storm will calm down. There are several theories which can explain why leaders act the way they do when in dire straits. Leaders may also act a bit hostile:
“The threat-rigidity theory posits that individuals and organizations, when faced with threats or crises, tend to adopt rigid, defensive responses. Leaders may narrow their focus, limit open communication, and avoid visibility as a means of trying to control risk and protect themselves or the organization from further harm” (Perplexity; Gigliotti and Alvarez-Robinson (2025)).Because I never met with the MD's/CEO's who rejected my proposal for an interview, I cannot testify if they matched the description from Gigliotti and Alvarez-Robinson. At the same time, direct observation is not a criteria. We can infer a relationship between results based on scientific rigor and a real life outcome, observed or latent.
Adding to that, the aggressive/hostile vicar who rejected me twice in a very hostile way, and then again in a very rude way questioned my presence at a church coffee meeting, had been under investigation for causing a bad work climate in the congregation.
And longstanding aggression/hostility is typically explained by mental health issues.
Being hostile and aggressive is explained by a high release of a hormone called cortisol, which blocks the hippocampi (there's one in each hemisphere), and triggers an activation in the neighboring amygdalae (also one in each hemisphere). The result: fight-flight mode (Goleman, 2006). This is how perplexity answers the question: how does fight-flight response affect a person's conversational style?
This is not the first bad apple I have encountered in Finland.
Why?
According to my former employer the University of Helsingfors, 73% of Finnish women and 70% of Finnish men, are expected to receive a psychological, behavioral, and psychiatric diagnosis.
Adding to that. Irrational aggression is a marker for Alzheimer's/dementia. Finland has the highest rate of Alzheimer's/dementia in the World, and for some reason, twice the rate compared to Sweden.
It's no surprise that not only the vicar, but also his assistant, expressed the above in their attack on me. And when I reminded him that he's under investigation for causing a bad work climate, he opted to end his interrogatory meeting.
Also: read:
Österberg (2022). Finlandssvenska Barnrättsdagen 2022, Helsingfors. Socialtjänstpersonal bör beakta faster Fiffi inom sig.
Österberg (2023 a). AgendaPride: All straight panel. Ted Uhros påstående om transidentitet är falsk. The bad Apple effect.
Österberg (2023 b). Finlandssvenska Barnrättsdagarna 2023. Del 1. Ett referat och jämförelse med etablerad vetenskap.
Österberg (2024). Finlandssvenska barnrättsdagarna 2024. Ett referat med kommentarer och slutsatser om en het politisk potatis
Österberg (2025 a). How I, despite living it the "happiest country in the world", became a victim of the bad Apple effect (case 2).
Österberg (2025 b). Henrika Backlund använder semantisk inversion/ konotypisk namngivning för att påstå saker om mig som mest liknar förtal. Är hon lämplig som verksamhetsledare för Finlands svenska idrott?
Österberg (2025 c). Nutrition Psychology. Depression in mid, late life linked to higher dementia risk: study (Daily Finland). Why not talk about depression – aggression?
Österberg (2025 d). Finlandssvenska barnrättsdagar 2025. Estlander förbjuder & bjuder in? mig – experten – från att delta. Chat Gtp: don't take it personally (it’s often more about them than you)
Österberg (2025 e). Historia; Språk] How the Russians brainwashed the Finns into an antipathy against Sweden which is still lasting
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More about my expertise:
Executive coaching for CEOs/managers and workshops to facilitate Organizational Performance, Learning, and Creativity for Problem Solving | Lectures: Nutrition for physical and mental health | Course/lecture: children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development | Language training - Swedish | Academy Competency | CV | Teaching skills and experience | Summary of research project | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube-channel | TikTok | Twitter
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