ORIGINAL PAPER The impact of team moral disengagement composition on team performance: the roles of team cooperation, team interpersonal deviance, and collective extraversion Babatunde Ogunfowora 1 & Madelynn Stackhouse 2 & Addison Maerz 3 & Christianne Varty 4 & Christine Hwang 4 & Julie Choi 5 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract 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. Keywords Moral disengagement . Team cooperation . Team interpersonal deviance . Team performance . Collective extraversion . HEXACO personality traits In recent years, ethics scholars have increasingly drawn on moral disengagement theory (Bandura, 1989) to understand why good people engage in behaviors that violate their moral standards. According to Bandura, people use a variety of cog- nitive distortions, collectively described as moral disengagement, to circumvent their moral standards. Extensive research to date supports the link between moral disengagement and unethical conduct at work (e.g., Moore, Detert, Treviño, Baker, & Mayer, 2012; Ogunfowora, Bourdage, & Nguyen, 2013). Moreover, findings from sports, social, and organizational psychology show that moral disen- gagement increases interpersonally harmful behaviors (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996; Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Pastorelli, & Regalia, 2001; Gini, Pozzoli, & Hymel, 2014; Huang, Wellman, Ashford, Lee, & Wang, 2017) and reduces prosocial/citizenship behav- iors (Bandura et al., 1996; Bandura et al., 2001; Bonner, Greenbaum, & Mayer, 2016; Hodge & Gucciardi, 2015). This body of research clearly indicates that moral disengage- ment is critical to understanding organizational effectiveness, including how employees treat each other at work. In light of this research, it is therefore surprising that we have limited theoretical understanding of the consequences of moral disengagement in social groups where people must work together towards collective goals (Kozlowski & Bell, 2013). Specifically, we know little about the consequences Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-020-09688-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Babatunde Ogunfowora togunfow@ucalgary.ca 1 Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive, NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada 2 Bryan School of Business and Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA 3 Smith School of Business, Queen’ s University, Kingston, Canada 4 Lazardis School of Business and Economics, Wilfred Laurier University , Waterloo, Canada 5 Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-020-09688-2 Published online: 29 April 2020 Journal of Business and Psychology (2021) 36:479–494