There is the team full of hard workers and there is the group of moaners, but according to researchers there is another type of team in the workplace – and they are up to no good.

Researchers say these “Machiavellian” types appear to throw themselves into group work while actually behaving as lone wolves.

Amy Armstrong, from Ashridge Executive Education, who led the study, said the research was part of an effort to explore how to boost engagement at work.

“Engagement levels in this country remain anaemic. They have been stubbornly flat for many years, and we have some of the highest levels of active disengagement in western Europe,” she said, adding that disengaged employees were vocal, took more time off than engaged staff and took up most of managers’ time.

Since many employees work in groups, the researchers turned their attention to teams. They studied 28 teams of employees across seven sectors, from the NHS to transport, with up to 15 people in each team. Four teams were compared across each organisation.

Based on measures such as answers to staff surveys, half of these teams were rated by their company as “highly engaged” – in other words, going the extra mile for their job – while half of the teams were flagged as “disengaged”.

However, Armstrong and her colleagues found not all was quite as it seemed. By talking to team members the researchers found that two of the 14 supposedly engaged groups were in fact simply contented and doing the bare minimum. One group was actively disengaged, and four of the groups were “pseudo-engaged”.

“I would describe these [pseudo-engaged] teams as Machiavellian,” said Armstrong.

These teams, the report found, say and do things to look good but are in fact pretending – in fact, they have a negative atmosphere and the participants are more worried about their own interests than those of the group. Team leaders, the report notes, often resort to “organised fun” to bring try to build relationships – although the leaders themselves are criticised for primarily being concerned about how they are viewed by management.

“When it comes to day to day work, stretching the workload to fill the time was one thing that we observed,” said Armstrong. “They were quite proud of the fact that they were playing the system and getting away with it. So if teams, for example, were doing shift work over a six-hour shift, they would boast that they were able to get the work done in four hours and spend the other two hours in their work chilling and drinking tea.”

Armstrong added that there were knock-on effects. “You might get a new entrant into the team who actually comes in engaged but within a short space of time sees these dysfunctional behaviours around them and thinks, well, why bother?”

As well as flagging problems with engagement surveys, Armstrong said the findings could help organisations to find ways to boost workers’ efforts.

Armstrong said organisations should do more to reward teams rather than just individuals, and that team leaders and line managers should get the message across that “there is only a certain amount you can accomplish alone, it is actually through collective and shared goals that we can reap productivity”.