Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

In the last few years, the metagame strategy of work politicking has evolved to include the act of labeling things "toxic." Article like this are just ammunition in that.

I get that this article is about the trade-off between productivity and a less-easily-quantifiable loss to morale. But only a sliver of the people hearing about the study from this article will be carefully applying the lessons learned in towards their personnel decisions.

> The findings show that avoiding a toxic employee generates returns of nearly two-to-one as compared to those generated when firms hire a rock star"

Why do you need to choose between these two though? Can't an interviewer pay attention to both the technical skills and the attitude of a potential hire? This sounds like a forced dichotomy just to justify a study nobody needs.

> While toxic employees are more productive, meaning getting more things done, the quality of that productivity often is less than desirable

If work is not up to standards then it's not done work and can't be considered productivity, can it? Again, do we really need a study to tell us that bad personality people who rush half done jobs to get that KPI are not what you want as employees?

It is not obvious or tautological that removing a bad employee is more valuable than acquiring a superb employee.

> Toxic employees don’t care about a company’s goals, nor do they care about building relationships with co-workers. More than just self-centered office bullies, toxic employees are actually strategic and covert.

This sort of describes the sociopaths of the Gervais Principle.

I don't necessarily see how this is a Bad Thing to be. If relationships help you through the day, sure, go for it, but it doesn't help you in your goals. Furthermore, your goals are, unless you are working for your own company, quite often directly opposed to what the company wants.

EDIT: let me expand on this:

Companies want (basically) the following:

- You to do as much work as possible

- You to require as little payment as possible

- Be completely loyal to the company, ie: work whenever they need you to, don't even think about changing jobs, etc etc.

What you (should) want:

- Have job where you'd be most content, which could be at your current job, but probably isn't. Let's be fair: your own ideas for projects would be much more fun to work on then whatever you do for the company.

- Get paid as much for the work you do

- Do as little work as possible, so you have more time for yourself, your family and friends.

I don't really see how their definition of 'toxic' checks all the boxes above. I don't care all that much for the company goals, since they are (to me) much less important than my own goals. I don't care too much for relationships with co-workers; they're my co-workers, they're not the life-long friends I already had before I started this job. Furthermore, given that on average they'll be gone in 2.5 years, spending too much time and energy into creating a relationship with someone who'll be gone by then seems like wasted effort. Furthermore, I am covert about this (since saying these things outright would be bad for my career prospects). However, my input in this company is still a net win (for both parties).

Their definition of 'toxic' is therefore inadequate.

How about toxic managers? For example the ones that hire the wrong person, or allow toxic environments to build up? Or the ones that promote people based on optics?