Toxic culture, Groundhog Day, and Déjà vu

Good people continue to be harmed by exposure to the dynamics of a toxic workplace culture and organizations lose their functional viability and sustainability. This is not a new discovery or topic of discussion for improving organizational health and individual wellness.

This reality begs a question: Since leaders are responsible for organizational culture and toxic cultures are so destructive to people and the organization, why do leaders continue to perpetuate toxic workplace cultures and habitually retain toxic workers?

"Feedback and engagement platforms will continue to be an organization’s best defense against the toxic effects of poor culture, attrition, and malaise," said Andrea Lagan, Chief Customer and People Officer of betterworks. "Be prepared and prescient, maintaining one organizational eye on today and the other on tomorrow to arm your enterprise, employees, and stakeholders against these challenges so 2021 can be a satisfying and productive one."

In July of 2019, SHRM commissioned research on toxic workplace cultures and what happens to the employees who work in them. "The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture: How Culture Impacts the Workforce -- and the Bottom Line," found that many workers consider culture and managers to be closely connected. In fact, 58 percent of employees who quit a job due to workplace culture say that their managers are the main reason they ultimately left. What is the cost of this turnover? It happens to be a whopping $223 billion in the past five years.

Extensive research (Housman and Minor with the Harvard Business School 2015) provides a working definition of a toxic work environment as an environment that negatively impacts the viability of an organization and is destructive to its employees. The definition of a toxic worker is a worker that engages in behavior that is harmful to an organization, including either its property or people. 

Manuela Priesemuth is Assistant Professor of Management at Villanova University. Her research focuses on destructive leadership, workplace aggression, organizational fairness, and behavioral ethics. Professor Priesemuth writes, "While direct interactions with 'bad bosses' can be traumatic for employees, the problem often goes further than a single individual. Indeed, some of my own research has shown that abusive behavior, especially when displayed by leaders, can spread throughout the organization, creating entire climates of abuse". This research is very clear on the connection between toxic workplace exposure and the loss of engagement. We have used this study as representative of our approach to identifying toxic workplace factors, and understanding the role of toxic environment nature relative to managers, leaders, work conditions, interpersonal relations, negative emotions, harmful behaviors, and their affects upon organizations and employees. 

What we are talking about in the context of a "toxic culture and toxic worker" is human behavior. We make a clear distinction between personality -- who you are- and human behavior -- what you do. Behavior is observable and measurable. We can take a scientific approach to the study of behaviors that are conducive to high performance and the associative growth and development of people at work. We can also study the opposite effects of abusive behavior that is disruptive to performance, disrespects and devalues the worth and dignity of people, impacts retention negatively, increases negative stress, and contributes directly to increased physical and mental health illnesses and their associated increase of healthcare costs. 

Janine Yancey adds, "Norms and practices define 'the way we do things here.' Positive norms and practices, where people’s behavior is generally respectful, civil and inclusive, are widely recognized by employees who rate their organization as healthy. When there aren’t strong positive norms in an organization, significantly fewer employees rate their organization as healthy. Unhealthy organizations have a vacuum of norms and practices, which provides an opening for toxicity to enter the workplace. This matters because every workforce is going to bring employees with different mindsets. Without understood norms, problems fester."

Our own research validates that abusive leadership and toxic team members directly affect the three key areas of the engagement/burnout dynamic namely, exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of efficacy. Our conclusion is irrefutable. It is impossible to achieve alignment between key objectives with individual performance to derive the results you desire as a leader with people working in a toxic workplace environment. With millions of people working for ineffective and abusive leaders, top talent heading for the exit doors to escape toxic team members, disengagement and burnout affecting the health of people, and a significant number of organizations in death spirals, don’t you think it is time that leaders take a serious look at stopping this insanity? To that end, we offer key strategies that research indicates can assist leaders in creating supportive and healthy work environments, foster engagement among team members, and achieve results that leaders need to sustain the long-term viability of their organizations.

First, every organization has a set of vision, mission, and core value statements. The problem is that few organizations have created an integrated and systematic methodology for teaching people of the organization what these statements mean and then holding people accountable to acting out these statements in their daily behaviors -- especially leaders. The motto is far too often, "do as I say not do as I do." We have witnessed senior leaders engaging in abusive and disrespectful behaviors to their mid-level leaders in meetings with the core values of respect and dignity hanging on the board room walls.  

There seems to be an apparent lack of self-awareness existing among many leaders with the result of this hypocrisy and duplicity contributing to disengagement, disillusionment, and mediocre performance. We advocate for increased self-awareness and self-management education for leaders at all levels of the organization. Along with this increased awareness we advocate for standards of accountability that put "skin in the game" -- a sense of legitimate self-interest for personal and corporate accountability. Performance is about your technical skill ability. It is also about your behavior competence. As a leader in the organization it is imperative that you make it explicitly clear that people will be held accountable in both performance dimensions with consequences if they do not behave responsibly.

Second, along with increased self-awareness and self-management, organizations can ensure that an integrated and systematic methodology for creating a culture that focuses on well-being and performance includes a social-awareness and social management dimension. You must have a feedback mechanism in the organization that functions in a way for effective use of information to identify toxic leaders and team members. Leaders typically use some form of employee engagement tool for the purpose of gaining feedback regarding the working conditions of their organization. They do so even with the research suggesting that 78% of their employees see no value in engagement surveys and fear retribution for sharing their honest perspective of their leaders and the organization.  

Third, your integrated and systematic methodology must link objectives, to performance, and then to the results. Typically toxic behaviors are very disruptive to conscientious team members. The "jerks at work" and their self-centered behaviors are a major cause of lack of focus among team members. A staff nurse shared with us the additional burden it causes to have to be on shift with a proverbial jerk at work. "You have to always be guarded and I do not feel safe," she said. Can you imagine the amount of distraction this dynamic creates for her? Do you understand the increased probability for a medical error or mistake to occur as a result of this distraction and loss of focus? If you have a performance system that clearly defines roles, goals, and expectations, aligns the work of people to your objectives and key results (OKRs), and conduct regular coaching sessions with people doing the work of the organization, you will identify your toxic leaders and team members. Having identified them you can begin to remove them from your organization. 

To be clear, we are not talking about people with difficult personalities. We are talking about people who do not understand how to behave appropriately, to behave respectfully, and to be civilly with other people. The spectrum of toxic behaviors runs the gamut from annoyance to illegal harassment and unsafe work environments. The cost in human terms and real dollars is immeasurable. Time to stop the insanity and create organizational cultures where people can grow and flourish, drive performance to the highest level, and get the results you desire as a leader. That’s worth thinking about today.

Photo credit: Khosro / Shutterstock

Dr. Michael E. Frisina is founder of The Frisina Group and author of the bestselling book, "Influential Leadership -- Change Yourself, Change Your Organization, Change Healthcare."

Rebekah Williamson is a research associate at The Frisina Group specializing in human performance, organizational effectiveness, and industrial psychology.