This is the fourth in a series of posts on toxicity in the workplace. Previous posts have named the behaviors that define toxic work environments, examined the personality traits of toxic leaders, and looked at the scale of toxic work environments in Ireland and across Europe. This post looks at what it actually costs people.
When we think about the effects of a toxic workplace, we tend to think first about the professional consequences. A career that stalls without explanation. A forced resignation dressed up as a mutual decision. A reference that is technically positive but nuanced with just enough ambiguity to give a hiring panel pause. Being passed over for opportunities that go instead to those closer to the leader with less expertise. Finding that your contributions are invisible in meetings but somehow visible enough to be attributed to someone else. Legitimate concerns dismissed as personality clashes, oversensitivity, or cultural differences. Complaints that go nowhere, quietly filed and purposefully forgotten. Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! shows why: drawing on testimonies from academics and students who raised concerns about bullying and harassment at universities, she argues that institutions are structured to absorb and neutralize complaints rather than act on them (Ahmed, 2021).
But the consequences are deeper. People in toxic environments describe losing their voice gradually, not in a single dramatic moment but through an accumulation of experiences that teach them that it’s safer to stay silent. They learn to read the room before speaking. They stop raising concerns out of fear of being accused of overstepping. They sit in meetings and watch others perform enthusiasm they do not feel, and they perform it too. They notice the smirks exchanged across the table when someone speaks up, the brief silence that tells them the room has already decided. Morale declines, in a way that is hard to point to and prove. People who were once confident and outspoken become hesitant, second-guessing their own judgment, their own memories, their own worth. The self-doubt that toxic leadership cultivates does not stay in the office. It also follows people home.
And then there is the physical cost.
What the Research Shows
A large-scale meta-analysis drawing on data from more than 115,000 individuals found consistent associations between exposure to workplace bullying and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress-related complaints. These associations were also consistent longitudinally, meaning that bullying predicted deteriorating mental health over time, not just at a single point (Verkuil et al., 2015).
The physical health consequences are also well documented. Chronic exposure to abusive supervision and workplace hostility activates the body’s stress response in ways that, over time, contribute to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, sleep disorders, and affect the immune system . Research drawing on conservation of resources theory, one of the influential frameworks in occupational health psychology, explains this through the lens of resource depletion: when the psychological, social, and material resources people need to function are chronically threatened or eroded, the result is psychological stress that, if sustained over time, takes a physical toll on individuals as well (Hobfoll, 1989). The body keeps a record of what we endure.
Burnout deserves particular attention. It is not, as it is often characterized, a problem of individual resilience or self-care. It is an organizational outcome, and a product of demands that outstrip resources over a sustained period. Research consistently identifies abusive supervision, lack of control, unfairness, and interpersonal conflict, all features of the toxic environments described in my earlier posts in this series, as the contributors of burnout (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Leiter and Maslach (2004) identify six organizational factors that consistently predict burnout: unsustainable workload, lack of control over one’s work, insufficient recognition, a breakdown in community, perceived unfairness, and a conflict between personal and organizational values. The toxic environments described in earlier posts contribute to these directly. Abusive supervision erodes community and fairness (Tepper et al., 2017). Knowledge hiding removes control. Interpersonal deviance destroys trust. Over time, these destroy people’s wellbeing.
When Everyone Is Affected
The health consequences of toxic workplaces are not confined to individual targets. Research on bystanders, those who witness bullying or toxic behavior without being its primary target, shows that they too experience elevated anxiety, depression, and burnout (Nielsen et al., 2024). Toxic environments are contagious. An organization that tolerates a toxic leader is not just exposing one or two individuals to harm. It is complicit in potentially harming the wellbeing of an entire team, department, or institution.
Wellbeing during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, for all its disruption, offered researchers an unusual window into the relationship between workplace demands, organizational stress, and employee health. My own research with colleagues Christina Butler and Adegboyega Ojo, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, examined how pandemic-related disruptions to working lives affected stress, burnout, and job satisfaction across career stages over time, drawing on three waves of data from 30 countries (Mockaitis, et al., 2022). The findings confirmed that exhaustion cut across all career stages, with those in mid-career particularly affected, while disengagement was most pronounced among early-career workers. The pandemic laid bare something the health literature has consistently shown, that when demands chronically outstrip resources, the consequences are measurable, significant, and not evenly distributed across the workforce.
It’s deadly serious
The health consequences of toxic management have been documented by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. In Dying for a Paycheck, Pfeffer assembles a large body of evidence that modern management practices, including workplace stress, lack of job control, economic insecurity, and toxic interpersonal dynamics, are not just damaging but in some cases fatal. In one survey he cites, 61% of employees reported that workplace stress had made them sick. Based on reviewing 228 studies, he estimates that job-related stress may contribute to approximately 120,000 excess deaths per year in the United States alone.
Pfeffer’s central argument is that human sustainability deserves the same attention from organizations as financial or environmental sustainability. Companies that would never tolerate a toxic waste dump on their premises routinely tolerate toxic leaders whose impact on employee health is no less damaging, if less visible. It is a book that anyone in a leadership or governance role should read, and it will resonate with anyone who has worked in a toxic environment.
This Matters Beyond the Individual
When we consider the health consequences of workplace toxicity, it is difficult to attribute it to interpersonal difficulties, personality differences, etc., It become an issue of organizational negligence. If we know that abusive supervision and toxic leadership produce measurable health harm, then tolerating them is a failure of duty of care.
Organizations that protect high-performing toxic leaders, that allow HR complaints to go nowhere, mistake loyalty structures for healthy culture, are not just showing poor management. They are (knowingly or unknowingly) enabling environments that are making people ill.
The next post in this series looks at the people who surround the toxic leader and make this possible.
Why I recommend these books:
Dying for a Paycheck If you have ever wondered whether your workplace is actually making you sick, the answer, backed by data from 228 studies, is that it very possibly is.
Complaint! If you have ever filed a complaint and found yourself worse off for having done so, Ahmed’s book will tell you why. Built on testimonies from people who tried to challenge power in universities and other institutions, it is a must read if you have been on the receiving end of a system that was supposed to protect you and didn’t.
This post is part of the Toxicity in the Workplace series. View all posts in the series.
References
Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint! Duke University Press. ISBN: 9781478017714
Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3): 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513
Leiter, M. P., & Maslach, C. (2004). Areas of worklife: A structured approach to organizational predictors of job burnout. In P. L. Perrewé & D. C. Ganster (Eds.), Research in occupational stress and well-being (Vol. 3, pp. 91–134). Elsevier.
Mockaitis, A. I., Butler, C. L., & Ojo, A. (2022). COVID-19 pandemic disruptions to working lives: A multilevel examination of impacts across career stages. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 138: 103768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2022.103768
Nielsen, M. B., Rosander, M., Blomberg, S., & Einarsen, S. V. (2024). Witnessing workplace bullying: A systematic review and meta-analysis of individual health and well-being outcomes. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 75: 101908. https://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1840003/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Pfeffer, J. (2018). Dying for a paycheck: How modern management harms employee health and company performance, and what we can do about it. HarperBusiness.
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
Verkuil, B., Atasayi, S., & Molendijk, M. L. (2015). Workplace bullying and mental health: A meta-analysis on cross-sectional and longitudinal data. PLOS ONE, 10 (8): e0135225. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0135225