Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

Also "toxic" is a term abused to mean "heretical" at times. The guy pointing out HR works for the company not you and is encouraged to some negative dynamics to justify their salary by reducing liability and claimed productivity may be branded toxic.

Charismatic people building their own fiefdoms that view networking as king and actual productivity gains a threat are building not just houses of cards but full scale card mansions are more actual organizational harm toxic than any ill-mannered productives.

> the most dominant hen, that pecked its way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other hens. Individual selection doesn't necessarily work to the benefit of the group

but wait... our entire economical system is based on this.

  > 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?

I suspect this is a rhetorical question, and what you may be saying is, "It's ridiculous that large swathes of business needs to be told this thing over, and over, and over again, and yet they will not learn."

That is my slant on this, because I observe that often times, the incentives in organizations are to do the wrong thing that leads to the local optimum, where we define "local" as, a particular manager's well-being.

If a manager is rated by the measured productivity of their teams, the will hire for the ability to make the number and manage to the number, regardless of whether the number reflects the overall good of the team or organization.

As they say, "You show me a metric, and I'll show you a game."

In a dysfunction organization, everyone can be individually aware that the organization's management is dysfunctional, but it can't be changed without an overwhelming majority of managers simultaneously cooperating.

Not only that, but some managers actually do better by "quelling rebellion" and enforcing the dysfunction. They will actively undermine any effort to organize change.

You don't need people to be ignorant of things like this, you just need people to be attached to their individual incentives, and you need a culture where those who try to make change are rejected by the host culture.

> tautological definition

There's a picture that gets re-posted on LinkedIn periodically of Netflix's CTO Reed Hastings captioned with a quote attributed to him: "Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high." Although this is the sort of feel-good positive fluff that is perfect LinkedIn-bait, I can't help but notice that the people who re-post it and re-share it tend to be people who I remember personally as being mostly just regular jerks. Look, I know better than to characterize myself as "brilliant" on the internet (and I honestly don't think I am, although I do think I'm competent), two things I indisputably am are educated and experienced. Since the subjective words "talented" and "brilliant" and "rockstar" are usually used as a stand-in for the more objective but contentious terms educated and experienced, I can't help but think that somewhere in the back of their minds, they're including me in their list. The people in my network who re-post this platitude usually didn't like me very much because they found themselves in a sticky situation that they expected me to be able to get them out of. When you're educated and experienced, but you still can't solve somebody's crisis on the spot, they don't think, "oh, well, I was asking a lot", they think, "he could have helped me, but he didn't because he's a jerk who thinks he's too good for me".

Example: a person is being singled out by manager and assigned the junk work and not supported. Other employees start using the black sheep as a scapegoat and “othering” them. Scapegoat is unskilled at interpersonal conflict, has few personal boundaries. They start drinking or otherwise coping, because overall they like their job. After 2 years they’re laid off and nobody reaches out to them or responds. Is the laid off employee toxic? Perhaps. Were there ignored warning signs? Is that toxic?

Lots of nuance in judgement. Most people feel toxicity, but there are strong incentives to maintain situational homeostasis and capitalize on others’ blind spots.

Personally I’ve dumped a lot of that programming and am looking for non-judgemental and discerning workplaces, like I remember from early in my career. Hopefully not a pipe dream.