This is the first in a series of forthcoming blog posts on toxicity in the workplace, drawing on research in organizational behavior, leadership, and personality psychology.

Much of my research sits at the intersection of leadership, values, personality, and international business. In recent years, a significant strand of that work has focused on the dark side of leadership, particularly on what scholars call the “dark triad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. My colleagues and I investigate how these traits shape leader behavior across organizational and national contexts, how they drive harmful workplace conduct, and what conditions allow them to flourish.

But it is also close to home. Not just mine. Research in this area is compelling precisely because so many working people recognize what it describes. The constructs we study in journal articles are not abstractions. They are things that happen to real people in real organizations, with real consequences for their health, their careers, and their sense of self.

This series is an attempt to bridge that gap. I hope to make the research accessible to anyone who is living it, has lived it, or is trying to understand what they see happening in their own workplace.

Most of us have encountered it at some point… A manager who shares critical information only with a trusted inner circle. A leader who praises those who offer unconditional loyalty while systematically undermining those who don’t. A culture in which people are pitted against each other to encourage distrust and where collaboration is quietly punished. You start to doubt your own judgment, your own memory of events, your own competence, although nothing in your career history suggested you had reason to.

This is what a toxic workplace feels like from the inside. And the research is unambiguous. It is harmful. It is not just “difficult personalities” or “cultural differences”, or “interpersonal friction.” Toxic workplaces have measurable consequences for people’s health, performance, and lives. Future posts in this series will look at those consequences in depth. But first, it helps to name what is actually going on.

Four Behaviors That Define Workplace Toxicity

Researchers in organizational behavior have identified several recurring patterns that, individually or in combination, constitute what we mean by a toxic work environment.

Abusive supervision is perhaps the most extensively studied. It refers to subordinates’ perceptions of their supervisor’s sustained, hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact (Tepper, 2000). This includes public humiliation, belittling remarks (oftentimes subtle), the silent treatment, taking credit for others’ work, and issuing unreasonable demands then blaming subordinates when those demands cannot be met. Its downstream effects are well documented: burnout, emotional exhaustion, reduced performance, psychological distress, and, as I will discuss in a later post, physical illness (Tepper et al., 2017).

Knowledge hiding is the deliberate withholding of information that a colleague has requested or that would benefit a colleague, team, or organization (Connelly et al., 2012). In toxic environments, information becomes a currency of power. Those inside the leader’s circle know things that others do not. Decisions are made and communicated selectively. People find out about changes to their own roles from third parties, or after the fact. Knowledge hiding is both a symptom of organizational toxicity and the way by which toxicity spreads.

Interpersonal deviance covers behaviors directed at harming other individuals in the organization: spreading rumors, excluding people from key conversations or groups, sabotaging colleagues’ reputations or relationships, and taking undeserved credit for others’ work (Mackey et al., 2021). What makes this particularly insidious in hierarchical settings is that leaders can engage in it with impunity, especially when those around them have been conditioned into a structure of loyalty.

Undermining deserves its own attention, because it is often the hardest to name. It can be overt: criticizing someone’s work in meetings while withholding constructive feedback in private, or reassigning responsibilities without explanation. It can also be extremely subtle. A pattern of being talked over. Work attributed to others. Praise given publicly to colleagues for contributions you made. Your contributions being ignored in meetings but repeated by someone else who is then given praise and credit for your idea. Being excluded from information relevant to your own role. None of these, taken in isolation, is easy to prove or even articulate. Together, they constitute a coordinated erosion of a person’s standing, confidence, and effectiveness, and when the source is a leader, the target is often left with the disorienting experience of doubting their own perceptions.

Designed to be Invisible?

These four behaviors rarely occur in isolation. In practice, they tend to cluster and reinforce one another, and they tend to emanate from a leader with dark traits. A supervisor who abuses will also hide information, because control over knowledge is an extension of control over people. A leader who engages in interpersonal deviance will undermine, because the targets are often more capable or qualified than the leader. Eroding their standing is self-protective behavior. Narcissistic leaders are known to be threatened by the competence of others and respond to that threat not by doing better themselves, but by diminishing those around them.  Research on dark triad personality traits helps explain why certain leaders display this entire cluster of behaviors rather than one or two in isolation. That will be the subject of the next post in this series.

What these behaviors also share is that each of them is plausibly deniable. Abusive supervision rarely leaves a paper trail. Knowledge hiding is easily framed as an oversight or a matter of confidentiality. Interpersonal deviance operates through whisper networks and conversations behind closed doors. Undermining is almost always designed to be invisible to anyone who is not its target. This deniability is what makes toxic leadership so difficult to confront and so exhausting to endure. The person on the receiving end is left not only scarred but also unable to explain what has happened in terms that colleagues, HR, or a formal complaints process will easily understand or acknowledge.

Naming what’s happening matters. Though it feels personal to many, supervisory abuse, undermining, interpersonal deviance and knowledge hiding are empirically validated constructs with decades of evidence behind them.

Coming Next

In later posts, I will look at the personality traits most commonly associated with leaders who behave this way, at the people around them who enable and sustain it, at the organizational contexts that allow it to persist, and what the evidence says about the cost to individuals, teams and organizations.

Further reading

Power: Why Some People Have It―and Others Don’t

HBR Guide to Navigating the Toxic Workplace

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

The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About

References

Mackey, J. D., McAllister, C. P., Ellen, B. P., & Carson, J. E. (2021). A meta-analysis of interpersonal and organizational workplace deviance research. Journal of Management, 47 (3), 597–622. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206319862612

Connelly, C. E., Zweig, D., Webster, J., & Trougakos, J. P. (2012). Knowledge hiding in organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 33 (1), 64–88. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.737

Tepper, B. J. (2000). Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal, 43 (2), 178–190. https://doi.org/10.2307/1556375

Tepper, B. J., Simon, L., & Park, H. M. (2017). Abusive supervision. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 123–152. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-041015-062539