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Toxic Workplace!
 Toxic
Workplace!
Managing Toxic Personalities and
Their Systems of Power

Mitchell E. Kusy
and Elizabeth L. Holloway
Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass
A Wiley Imprint
989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741—www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted
under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written
permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright
Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on
the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the
Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax
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Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information
may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in
preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness
of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a
particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials.
The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with
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not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kusy, Mitchell.
Toxic workplace! : managing toxic personalities and their systems of power / Mitchell E. Kusy and Elizabeth L. Holloway.
— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-42484-1 (cloth)
1. Problem employees. 2. Interpersonal conflict. 3. Conflict management. 4. Personnel management. I. Holloway,
Elizabeth. II. Title.
HF5549.5.E42K87 2009
658.3’045—dc22
2008055671
Printed in the United States of America

first edition

HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Part One: Understanding Toxic People and Toxic

Environments 1
1. The Human and Financial Costs of Working with
Toxic People: Toxic Behaviors Are Just the Tip of
the Iceberg 3
2. Recognizing the Toxic Personality: It Isn’t as Easy as
You Think 21
3. Leader Reactions and Strategies That Typically
Don’t Work: Why Identify Strategies That Don’t
Work? 43
4. Organizational Culture: How Toxicity Spreads Like
an Infection 67
Part Two: The Toxic Organization Change
System Model 85
5. Organizational Strategies: Dealing with Toxicity at
the Highest System Level 89
6. Team Strategies: Dealing with Toxicity at the Team
Level 111
7. Individual Strategies: Dealing with Toxic People
One-on-One 151

v
vi CONTENTS

8. Myths and Truths About Toxicity—and Renewal

from a Toxic Environment: How to Move Beyond
Toxicity 181
Appendix A: Our Research Methodology 209
Appendix B: National Survey Responses on Toxic
Behaviors 215
Notes 233
The Authors 237
Index 239
 To all those who have suffered from the effects of toxic
behaviors at work. And to the leaders who told us their
stories in hope of finding paths to respectful engagement in
their organizations and communities.
 Visit
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 Toxic Workplace!

‘‘The day this person left our organization is

considered an annual holiday!’’
 Part One

Understanding Toxic People

and Toxic Environments

Before you can solve a problem, you have to fully understand

it. Therefore, the chapters in Part One examine in depth toxic
people—those who do damage to their coworkers, staffs, bosses,
and customers. Chapter One describes the significant organi-
zational losses, human and financial, that these people cause.
Because recognizing toxicity is not easy, Chapter Two describes
the types of toxic behavior, from humiliating others to sabotaging
team efforts. Chapter Three identifies strategies that don’t work in
dealing with toxic people so you won’t waste your time on these!
And Chapter Four shows how toxicity spreads like an infection
in organizations.
 1
THE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL
COSTS OF WORKING WITH TOXIC
PEOPLE
Toxic Behaviors Are Just the Tip of the
Iceberg

Working with this toxic individual was one of the worst experiences in my
life. It took a long time to recover from her abuse. It was difficult because
others witnessed what was happening but were scared they might receive the
same abuse so they did not want to get involved.

—Quote from study respondent

You have probably picked up this book because you are

either suffering or have suffered the ravages of a toxic personality
at work. Most people have. Does the opening quotation from
our national study on toxic personalities, in which we inter-
viewed and surveyed more than four hundred leaders, hit close to
home? Maybe it resurrects memories of your own gut-wrenching
experiences with toxic personalities at work
Most of us have experienced the frustration and confusion
of having an extremely difficult person to deal with in the
workplace. Call them what you will: control freaks, narcissists,
manipulators, bullies, poisonous individuals, or humiliators, to name
just a few of the descriptors that we heard during our interviews.
And we have heard other terms in our consulting practices and
our research that describe what these people do: poison, corrupt,
pollute, and contaminate. This is not your common, everyday
variety of difficult person who gets on your nerves occasionally
but without lasting effects. Instead, based on our research, we

3
4 TOXIC WORKPLACE!

define the toxic personality as anyone who demonstrates a pattern

of counterproductive work behaviors that debilitate individuals,
teams, and even organizations over the long term.

Based on our research, we define the toxic personality as

anyone who demonstrates a pattern of counterproductive
work behaviors that debilitate individuals, teams, and even
organizations over the long term.

These difficult individuals have the capacity to pervade our

thoughts and sap our energies so much so that they have the
potential to undermine our sense of well-being. In a variety of
ways, they get under our skin, infiltrate our professional and
personal space, demoralize us, demotivate teams, and ultimately
can even make us doubt our own competence and productivity.
They are toxic in every sense of the term.
In the most egregious situations, we may have an exagger-
ated emotional reaction to their toxicity and carry these feelings
home to our families, friends, and significant others. These reac-
tions may include lashing out at others, being uncommunicative
about what is eating away at us, and even being in a signifi-
cant depression requiring medication. Unfortunately, unless you
can pick up and move to a new job, it seems impossible to
escape the deleterious effects of these toxic individuals. And
sometimes these effects continue even after the toxic person is
no longer around. We found many situations where the toxicity
lingers in the system after the toxic person leaves voluntarily or
is fired.

In the most egregious situations, we may have an exaggerated

emotional reaction to their toxicity and carry these feelings
home to our families, friends, and significant others.
 THE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL COSTS OF WORKING WITH TOXIC PEOPLE 5

The Ubiquity of Toxic People

How pervasive is this problem? In our survey results, 64 percent
of the respondents were currently working with a toxic person-
ality, and a whopping 94 percent have worked with someone
toxic in their career. Another research study discovered that
27 percent of employees in a representative sample of seven hun-
dred Michigan residents experienced mistreatment by someone at
work.1 And in certain occupations, the abuse is astronomical. For
example, in a study of nurses, an overwhelming 91 percent had
experienced verbal abuse, defined as mistreatment in which they
felt attacked, devalued, or humiliated; in addition, more than
50 percent did not believe themselves competent to respond to
the verbal abuse.2 In general, one study after another confirms
that verbal abuse increases job dissatisfaction, builds a hostile
work setting, and lowers morale.
Here’s another example. In an ingenious and clever study,
employees in a manufacturing plant carried handheld computers
for up to three weeks.3 At four random intervals daily, they had
to report any interactions with either a coworker or boss from the
perspective of whether the interaction was positive or negative
and what their current mood was at the time. The researchers
found that the negative interactions affected the moods of these
employees five times more strongly than the positive ones, even
though they reported positive interactions three to five times
more often than the negative ones.
To get a further sense of the intensity of these interactions,
author Robert Sutton described the effects of ‘‘jerks’’ in the
workplace.4 He identified a situation in which a CEO of a
health care information technology system company, sent an
e-mail he had intended for the organization’s highest-level folks.
In this message, he bemoaned the fact that not all employ-
ees were working full forty-hour weeks and said he wanted
the employee parking lot full from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on
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