Toxic colleagues more harmful than we think
Study finds obnoxious jerks cost company $12,500 a year in lost productivity
Every workplace has them. The colleague who bad-mouths you behind your back at the water cooler. The boss who takes credit for everyone else’s ideas. The sexist jerk people actively avoid by taking circuitous routes to the printer and lying about their happy hour plans.
These employees are the bane of enterprise and they’re everywhere. Not only are they detrimental to a company’s morale, they are extremely costly to its bottom line and can do far more harm to an organization than outliers at the other extreme — the superstar employees — do good.
But who are these people exactly? And how are they different from the rest of us?
In a provocative new Harvard Business School working paper, researchers Michael Housman and Dylan Minor crunched data from 50,000 employees at 11 companies to come up with what may be the world’s most detailed personality profile of a “toxic worker.”
Using information from a company that builds software designed by industrial-organizational psychologists to assess a job applicant’s fitness for a particular position, the researchers were able to gain an extraordinary window into a modernday worker’s mind. The job-testing program included questions about everything from how they view their own abilities to their attitudes toward teamwork.
All of the workers in the study were employed in front-line service positions and paid on an hourly basis. The researchers also had access to the employees’ daily performance data, which represented productivity based on the average time it took them to handle a transaction and customer service ratings, as well as basic employment data such as their job title, location, hire date, termination date (if applicable) and reason for termination.
In the continuum of toxic workers, there are those who are simply annoying and might just be a bad fit for an organization. At the other end are those who engage in harassment, bullying, fraud, theft or even violence in the workplace. The study zeroed in on those at the most extreme of the extreme who were fired for their toxic behaviour.
The study’s findings aren’t exactly what you might expect, but the consequences of employing such people can be enormous for a company. The researchers calculated that these workers can cost $12,489 due to the need to replace other workers who leave due to their behaviour. That’s an almost two-to-one return as compared to their estimates for what a company gains from a superstar employee in the 1per cent of productivity — an increase in $5,303 in value.
In their paper, Housman and Minor explain that the best way to deal with these toxic workers is simple: avoid them.
Human resources programs and interviews in the future could be designed to screen them out, for instance.
But what if you already have some of these employees in your midst?
You needn’t despair that your organization is doomed. According to the research, the factors that lead to a potentially toxic worker to act in a toxic way are likely to be numerous and complex and isn’t all about fixed personality traits.
Here’s one example: They found that the number of other toxic workers around them or the “density” of toxic workers in your group can influence whether they act appropriately, with the lower the density the better the outcome. It’s akin to the way peer pressure can steer teens in the wrong direction.
“There is some hope,” they wrote, “that through judicious management of a worker’s environment, toxicity can be reduced.”