I just finished a project with a company where everyone was super polite, and team meetings flowed smoothly. Yet, most employees were unhappy. I heard complaints from many sides, yet no one told the CEO their concerns directly. 

The CEO was misguided, leading the team under the impression that everyone agreed. In reality, I was receiving messages from team members complaining about the CEO and two senior leaders and their toxic behavior. 

Unfortunately, a toxic workplace culture isn’t rare. What makes it really difficult in most scenarios is that the leadership usually has good intentions and describes the company culture as inclusive, forward-thinking, and human-centered. 

The task is to help the leadership team, in this case the CEO, see the toxicity and understand how and who is contributing to it. 

What is a Toxic Workplace Culture? 

When we talk about a toxic workplace culture, we usually focus on people. The narcissistic manager, the difficult colleague, or the leader who takes the credit and shifts blame. 

People often describe the actions of one person, instead of the underlying system that allows that kind of behavior.  

Workplace toxicity is how an organization reacts to a situation that caused pain and harm (Frost, 2003). The situation itself doesn’t create toxicity. Difficult situations overall can actually build cohesion and a more effective team. Also, addressing and managing workplace pain fosters constructive growth and transformation, whereas ignoring it allows toxicity to fester. 

The experience of harm is not based on the pain itself that someone is experiencing, but on whether one gets support to stop and prevent this kind of behavior within a company. 

3 Elements that Create a Toxic Workplace

A toxic organization is never the result of one person’s actions. There are three “toxins” that together create a toxic organization: leaders, managers, and culture (Appelbaum and Roy-Girard, 2007). 

Leadership research describes a similar dynamic (Padilla et al., 2007): destructive leaders, followers who go along with them, and an environment that allows it. This is also called the “toxic triangle.” 

1. Leaders

An organization’s tone is created at the top. This is why a toxic environment is a top-down phenomenon. The higher within the organization the toxic behavior sits, the deeper it spreads. It is the cumulative effect of behavior and organizational climate over time that makes a leader toxic, not one single action. 

While asking ‘who is toxic’ in an organization can help when analyzing teams, a more fascinating question, in my opinion, is: Why do people keep following leaders who harm them? 

Jean Lipman-Blumen (2005) asked this question in her research. What she found is most intriguing. Toxic leaders speak to some of our deepest needs: security, significance, and belonging. Being close to power makes people feel chosen. Consequently, that belonging can come with a price: keeping doubts to yourself, so you don’t lose your place. 

Other research shows that people also conform out of fear, even when they don’t agree with the leader. They have simply learned that disagreeing costs more than staying quiet. And in the end, work is work, so why choose the more difficult path (Padilla et al., 2007). That was exactly the team I described at the beginning.  

2. Managers

Managers have a difficult job because they sit in the middle, making them influential in both directions. They can pass on the pressure from above to their team, or they can act as a buffer. Many absorb and manage toxic behavior, so their teams can keep on working. Others amplify it. Some manage up and even succeed in changing the culture by building an extraordinary relationship with the leadership team. 

Managers become a problem when companies promote because of short-term output above everything else (Appelbaum & Roy-Girard, 2007). This sends a very specific culture message. And because most managers have autonomy, they can create their own toxic subcultures within teams, even inside an otherwise healthy organization (Sull & Sull, 2022). You can see that when a company has great overall engagement scores, yet one team is quietly looking for new opportunities outside the organization. 

Managers ultimately translate leadership into the daily experience. 

3. Toxic Culture

Culture is shaped by written and unwritten rules. The written rules in your company are clear. However, the unwritten ones are the ones that form people’s behavior. And most unwritten rules are about emotions. 

Feeling Rules

Arlie Hochschild (my favorite sociologist) called these feeling rules: the shared, mostly unspoken norms that tell us which emotions are appropriate in a situation, how strongly we feel them, and how we should show them (Hochschild, 1979, 1983). 

Emotion Concepts

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett helps explain why these rules are so powerful. Emotions are not fixed reactions that simply happen to us. The brain constructs them by making sense of what is happening in the body using emotion concepts. That is how we interpret and understand emotions based on what we have learned from our families, our culture, and the groups we belong to (Barrett, 2017). 

Organizations teach emotion concepts too. They decide what counts as “passion” and what counts as “aggression”, when concern is called “commitment,” and when it is called “negativity”. 

These feeling rules tell people which emotions they are allowed to show. Emotion concepts shape what people believe they are feeling in the first place. 

In a toxic culture, the vocabulary shrinks. People are “fine,” “busy,” or “aligned,” and everything else has no name; therefore, no space, and consequently it doesn’t exist—or does it? 

Surface Acting

When what we feel doesn’t match what the rules expect, we start working on our emotions. Hochschild called this emotion work. There are two ways you might be doing it. One is called surface acting; you change what you show. The other one is called deep acting. That happens when you go further by making yourself feel what you are supposed to feel. And when an organization expects this as part of the job, she calls it emotional labor. 

Emotive dissonance describes the gap between what you feel and what you show. This creates stress, exhaustion, and growing distance from your own emotions over time. 

What that Means in Organizations 

Your organization has no set of written rules for feelings. Instead, people learn them through what gets rewarded and what gets “punished.” They can see it in who gets promoted after showing frustration and who gets labeled “difficult.” What happens to the person who raises a concern in your leadership meeting? 

In the company I described above, the rules were clear. You simply agree in the meeting and raise your concerns privately. And criticisms of leadership are being expressed to people outside of the organization. 

The biggest problem with social norms like feeling rules is that they outlive the person who started it. Even if you replace the leader, the team will most likely keep following the old rules (Sull & Sull, 2022). 

Feel it, but don’t say it

Through my research, I have developed a model describing how people process and move through emotional experiences: Experience, Evaluate, and Express. The 3Es happen synchronously and infinitely in every interaction we have.  

This is also where toxic work cultures do the most damage, intra-personally and interpersonally. 

Emotions are predictions. They provide us with information and signals. When we are not allowed to express what we feel and think, this very intricate system gets disrupted and impacts not only the individual person, but also the entire team. It eventually leads to a lack of innovation and productivity. 

Experience.

The first step is acknowledging that something is happening: frustration in a meeting, worry about a decision, discomfort with how a colleague was treated. Barrett’s work shows that emotions carry information. They are the brain’s way of making sense of a situation, and the more precisely we can name them, the more useful that information becomes. 

Evaluate.

The second step is the pause between feeling and acting. What is this emotion telling me? Is it about this moment, or something in the past? How should I respond? And in a healthy culture, teams evaluate together. A leader can ask: What is our frustration telling us about this decision? In a toxic culture, evaluation happens alone, or in private messages, and it usually ends with the same conclusion: it’s not worth saying.

Express.

The third step is choosing how, when, and whether to share what you feel, in a way that fits the situation, the relationship, and our values. This is where toxic culture does the most damage. When certain expressions get penalized, people start surface acting. The emotion stays, the signal and meaning gets lost, and the dissonance grows.

Feeling an emotion doesn’t mean you have to act on it. But a culture that punishes expression forces people to perform instead. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that we often need the people around us to make sense of what we feel, and only through exchange with others does it become clear what we are sensing.

This creates trust and security in teams. 

I have seen some quite phenomenal results happen when teams flow together. But I have also seen teams perform in full agreement, keeping everything to themselves, and leaders reading that lack of involvement as a lack of ability. 

Signs of a Toxic Workplace Culture: The Behavior to Watch for

The problem with behavior is that it isn’t always easy to see. The obvious ones, like shouting, harassment, and open bullying, are easy to spot. 

Disrespect, noninclusion, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive behavior are harder to name. It becomes even harder when the behavior is ambiguous. That could be a dismissive comment or a leader who pretends to be too busy for a regular check-in. Someone who is pretending that they simply forgot to invite you to a meeting. Or the team that goes out late at night, knowingly excluding the new parent. How do you prove what you only sense? 

The sociologist Erving Goffman gives us a useful way to think about this. He described social life as having a front stage, where we perform for an audience, and a backstage, where we drop the performance. In organizations, leadership meetings are the front stage. The hallway, the private messages, and the coffee afterward are the backstage. Leaders mostly see the front stage. The toxic behavior and its effects mostly live backstage.

So what should you watch for? Look at three kinds of behavior.

Behavior that silences.

Interrupting. Dismissing a question with a joke. “Let’s take this offline,” and then it never comes up again. The person who disagreed and is quietly left off the next invite list. None of these is dramatic on its own. Together, they teach a team that speaking up has a price.

Behavior that excludes.

Decisions made in side conversations. Information shared with some people and not others. An inner circle that everyone knows exists, and nobody talks about.

Behavior that rewards the wrong things.

Credit that travels upward, and blame that travels downward. Results celebrated regardless of how they were achieved. Composure rewarded, and honesty labeled as negativity.

Over time, these behaviors turn into unwritten rules. Look out for cultures where people learn to:

• never express their feelings unless they are positive
• never point out the reality of a situation
• not ask questions and simply do as they are told
• find someone to blame as soon as a problem appears
• keep up the organization’s image at all costs

(Adapted from Coccia, 1998, as cited in Appelbaum & Roy-Girard, 2007.)

How Do You Tell a Leader That He Is The Problem?

That is the million-dollar question. Carefully and preferably with support, either through evidence or what I call “work intervention” and/or with external help. In my experience, most leaders are defensive because what they hear contradicts everything they believe about themselves and their cultures. It is rare that a leader actually doesn’t care. 

A few things that help:

Separate intention from impact. Acknowledge the intention first. Then describe the impact, using what people experience, not labels like “toxic.”

Separate Behaviors from Outcomes. Understand and address behaviors that led to a specific outcome. If we desire a different outcome, we must adjust the behavior.

Talk about patterns, not one incident. One moment can be explained away. 

A pattern across several people and situations is much harder to dismiss.

Make it about the system. “Your team has learned that disagreeing with you isn’t safe” opens a different conversation than “you are the problem.” It is also more accurate. The leader shaped the rules, but everyone is following them.

How do you point out to a leader that the culture he describes is only theory, not reality?

Organizational researchers distinguish between our espoused theory (what we say we do) and our theory-in-use (what our actions show we actually do) (Argyris & Schön, 1974).

In practice: The culture on your website is the espoused theory. The culture in the hallway is the theory-in-use.

Leaders often can’t see the gap because they are the last ones to receive honest information. Organizations are remarkably good at making the extraordinary seem ordinary (Ashforth & Kreiner, 2002), and from the top, polite meetings look like a healthy team. Instead of arguing with a leader about their description of the culture, show them the evidence that you observe in meetings, such as:  

• Whether concerns are actually raised. 
• What is the turnover in teams? 
• What do you hear in exit interviews or anonymous feedback? 
• Who has stopped speaking up?

How do you audit your own company and team?

This is where anthropology comes in handy: become an observer. Allow for more pauses; take longer breaks between responses and ask more questions. The more you ask, the more people will become comfortable with you asking, and the more honest answers you will receive.  

The 3 questions you, as a leader, can ask to get a full picture of what is happening in your company or team are:

1. Who is allowed to show frustration? If frustration is a privilege of rank, your team has learned to hide it on the way up.
2. What happens when someone disagrees? Not in the meeting, but in the weeks after. One sidelined person teaches a whole team to nod.
3. Which emotions are labeled “unprofessional”, and for whom? Notice which emotions are allowed, for whom, and in which room. The answer often differs by role, gender, and background.

The answers to these questions provide enough insight to take it from there.

Start slow, then ask more questions. 

Culture change starts with you and how people get rewarded for their behavior. 

References

• Andersson, L. M., & Pearson, C. M. (1999). Tit for tat? The spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 452–471. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1999.2202131
• Appelbaum, S. H., & Roy-Girard, D. (2007). Toxins in the workplace: Affect on organizations and employees. Corporate Governance, 7(1), 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1108/14720700710727087
• Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. Jossey-Bass.
• Ashforth, B. E., & Kreiner, G. E. (2002). Normalizing emotion in organizations: Making the extraordinary seem ordinary. Human Resource Management Review, 12(2), 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-4822(02)00047-5
• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Frost, P. J. (2003). Toxic emotions at work: How compassionate managers handle pain and conflict. Harvard Business School Press.
• Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
• Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049
• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
• Lipman-Blumen, J. (2005). The allure of toxic leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians—and how we can survive them. Oxford University Press.
• Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706–725. https://doi.org/10.2307/259200
• Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001
• Sull, D., & Sull, C. (2022, September). How to fix a toxic culture. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-fix-a-toxic-culture/
• Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2022, January). Toxic culture is driving the Great Resignation. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/