Series: Toxicity in the Workplace

This is the third in a series of posts on toxicity in the workplace. The first post named four behaviors that characterize toxic work environments. The second looked at the personality traits most commonly associated with the leaders who generate them. This post looks at how widespread the problem is.

One of the more disorienting experiences of working in a toxic environment is the sense of isolation it produces. The behaviors described in earlier posts in this series, abusive supervision, knowledge hiding, interpersonal deviance, and undermining, are each designed to operate below the threshold of what can easily be named or proven. The person on the receiving end often feels alone, uncertain whether what they are experiencing is real, and reluctant to speak about it for fear of not being believed or, worse, of being made to look like the problem.

Toxic workplaces are not rare. They are not confined to particular industries or sectors. I thought it would be interesting to review data about it in Ireland. And what I discovered is quite sobering.

What’s Happening in Ireland

A 2024 survey of Irish workers conducted by Matrix Recruitment found that the vast majority of respondents considered bullying a significant workplace issue, and close to one in three said they had experienced it personally. The behaviors they described included passive-aggressive remarks, unjust criticism in front of colleagues, and verbal abuse.

Ireland’s Central Statistics Office found that among those who reported experiencing workplace discrimination, bullying or harassment was the most cited form, identified by over one-third of respondents (CSO, 2025). In the academic literature, one study found that 43% of Irish workers had experienced ill-treatment at work over a two-year period, with 9% meeting the formal criteria for workplace bullying (Hogan et al., 2020). Earlier ESRI survey data found that 7.9% of those at work reported experiencing bullying within the past six months, with women at higher risk than men, and the sectors with the highest rates including education, public administration, and health and social work, with incidence rates of between 12% and 14%.

It is worrying that the sectors with the highest reported rates of workplace bullying in Ireland are not high-pressure financial, multinational or competitive sales environments. They are the public sector, education, and healthcare: institutions built around a mandate to serve people, employing large numbers of educated professionals, and with governance structures that are supposed to provide accountability.

The economic cost is also considerable. One study estimated that the annual value of lost productivity from workplace bullying in Ireland amounts to approximately €239 million, with bullying independently associated with an extra day of absence from work over a four-week period (Cullinan et al., 2020). The economic costs are significant, but as Jeffrey Pfeffer argues in Dying for a Paycheck, the human costs run deeper still, and that will be the focus of the next post.

Looking Further Abroad

Ireland is not an outlier. Across Europe, the picture is similarly concerning. The European Working Conditions Telephone Survey 2021, drawing on responses from more than 70,000 workers across 36 countries, found that roughly one in eight EU workers had encountered some form of adverse social behaviour at work in that year, including bullying, harassment, verbal abuse, and unwanted sexual attention (Eurofound, 2022). Meta-analytic research across multiple European samples puts the average prevalence of workplace bullying specifically at around 14.6%, with figures ranging from 11% to 18% depending on how bullying is measured (Nielsen et al., 2010).

Closer to Home: The Higher Education Sector

For those working in universities and other higher education institutions, a national survey commissioned by the Irish Department of Further and Higher Education and conducted by the DCU Anti-Bullying Centre is particularly relevant. It covered staff across 20 publicly funded institutions, with over 3,800 respondents, and confirmed that bullying is a significant and documented issue in the sector, with persistent patterns of negative acts at work, weak anti-bullying cultures, and low levels of psychological safety in many teams (Mazzone et al., 2022). Heavy workloads was a significant issue, with 35.8% of respondents reporting very demanding workloads and 34% that their personal life suffered because of it.

It may seem as though the higher education, as the toxic triangle framework discussed in the previous post would predict, is a fertile environment for toxic leadership. Hierarchical structures, wide status differences, heavy reliance on reputation and peer evaluation and metrics, and limited external oversight of day-to-day management all create an environment in which a leader can construct and validate their own power almost unchecked. The data show that toxic leadership is prevalent.

What this Means

The figures presented in this post represent real people navigating real workplaces. If roughly one in ten workers in Ireland has experienced workplace bullying in a given period, that’s hundreds of thousands of individuals. They are colleagues, managers, direct reports, people in the same meetings, attending the same team events. The next post in this series looks at what that experience costs them.

References

Central Statistics Office. (2025). Equality and Discrimination 2024. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-ed/equalityanddiscrimination2024/

Cullinan, J., Hodgins, M., Hogan, V., & Pursell, L. (2020). The value of lost productivity from workplace bullying in Ireland. Occupational Medicine, 70 (4): 251–258. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqaa067

Eurofound. (2022). Working conditions in the time of COVID-19: Implications for the future. European Working Conditions Telephone Survey 2021 series. Publications Office of the European Union. https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/surveys/2021/european-working-conditions-telephone-survey-2021

Hogan, V., Hodgins, M., Lewis, D., MacCurtain, S., Mannix-McNamara, P., & Pursell, L. (2020). The prevalence of ill-treatment and bullying at work in Ireland. International Journal of Workplace Health Management, 13 (3): 245–264. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWHM-09-2018-0123

Mazzone, A., Jones, E., Freeney, Y., & O’Higgins Norman, J. (2022). Report on the national survey of staff experiences of bullying in Irish higher education institutions. DCU Anti-Bullying Centre. https://www.dcu.ie/antibullyingcentre/report-national-survey-staff-experiences-bullying-irish-higher-education

Nielsen, M. B., Matthiesen, S. B., & Einarsen, S. (2010). The impact of methodological moderators on prevalence rates of workplace bullying: A meta-analysis. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 83 (4): 955–979. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317909X481256

O’Connell, P., Calvert, E., & Watson, D. (2007). Bullying in the workplace: Survey reports, 2007. Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment/ESRI. https://www.esri.ie/publications/bullying-in-the-workplace-survey-reports-2007