Toxic Culture in Organizations: Pinpointing the Elements Leading Employees to Disengage

Toxic culture is used to describe a company’s organizational environment that promotes hatred, exclusion, and/or inequity. All the results of toxic culture are negative attitudes, conflict, and toxicity among employees. This can lead to reduced morale, disengagement in the workplace, bullying, low productivity, increased absenteeism and sick days, turnover of key employees, and higher rates of accidents.

Highlights:

1. Toxic attitudes and behaviors from stakeholders, including employees, can create a place where people are demoralized, disengaged, and unable to perform optimally.
2. The elements leading to a toxic culture could include a lack of accountability and clarity around the mission, siloed leadership, incivility shown by people in power or decision-making roles, and a lack of trust between colleagues.
3. The warning signs of a toxic culture could include increased time spent on social media or complaints about colleagues despite the potential for advancement.
4. Consequences of a toxic culture include disengagement from work (both individual and team members), hostility among employees, lower productivity, and customer dissatisfaction.
5. Ways to address toxicity in the workplace include strengthening organizational values and encouraging team sharing to establish a sense of security and creating more opportunities for employee participation in decision-making.

Everyone has a right to enjoy their work environment, but when toxic culture seeps in and starts to impact morale, team members can begin to lose interest. Toxic culture is used to describe a company’s organizational environment that promotes hatred, exclusion, and/or inequity. Toxic culture is a cycle of destructive behaviors that negatively impact the individual and the rest of the organization (Padilla et al., 2007). The results of toxic culture are negative attitudes, conflict, and toxicity among employees. This can lead to reduced morale, disengagement in the workplace, bullying, low productivity, increased absenteeism and sick days, turnover of key employees, and higher rates of accidents (Gilbert et al., 2012). Nearly 48 million workers quit their jobs in 2021 in the U.S. (Krause, 2022), costing employers a significant amount in lost productivity; some estimate it to be about $200 billion. Identifying the elements that lead to disengagement can help leaders work on fixing the problems driving this trend.