What is a toxic work culture? The signs, what it costs, and how to fix it

Most leaders find out about a toxic team late: from a resignation letter, a grievance or an online review. By then the people inside it have usually stopped saying so, and the company-wide engagement average looks fine.

People say "toxic work culture" about a bad week, a demanding boss and outright abuse alike. To fix one, you need a narrower definition: one you can observe, measure and change.

The short answer: a toxic work culture is one where disrespect, exclusion, unethical behaviour, cutthroat rivalry or abusive management is tolerated as normal. In an MIT Sloan Management Review analysis of over 1.3 million US employee reviews, these five attributes did by far the most damage to culture ratings. To fix it, change leaders' behaviour, what gets rewarded and promoted, team norms and the design of work, then measure progress team by team, not as one average.

What is a toxic work culture?

Researchers have not agreed on one definition, and online lists of red flags rarely overlap. The most useful working definition comes from data. Donald Sull and colleagues analysed more than 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews by US employees of large companies (the Culture 500), across 128 topics, to find which complaints pulled culture ratings down most. Five stood out, which they call the Toxic Five:

• Disrespectful: people say they feel disrespected. This had the largest negative effect of any single topic, slightly larger than an employee calling the culture "toxic" outright.
• Noninclusive: groups treated unfairly or kept out because of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability or age, plus cronyism (managers playing favourites) and cliques.
• Unethical: dishonesty, shading the truth, and ignoring regulations.
• Cutthroat: colleagues actively undermining one another. Ordinary friction between teams barely moved ratings; sabotage did.
• Abusive: sustained hostility from managers, such as bullying, shouting or belittling people, as opposed to a boss having one bad day.

The same research separates toxic from merely irritating. Employees complain about bureaucracy, risk aversion or an impersonal feel, but those were not the elements that did the most damage. Tough is not the same as toxic.

One incident is not a culture. A culture is the pattern people learn from what is repeated and what nobody with power stops; our guide to what organizational culture is covers the wider definition. "Toxic workplace culture" and "toxic company culture" describe the same thing.

What are the signs of a toxic work culture?

Look for behaviours, not moods. Most of these will not surface in a leadership meeting, because bad news about toxic behaviour tends to be filtered out as it travels up the hierarchy.

The signs are usually local. Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores across business units, and the MIT research found that, on average, 10% of employees in large US companies mentioned at least one toxic element in their reviews between 2016 and 2020, ranging from 2% to 22% across companies. Even the healthiest cultures can contain toxic pockets.

Those pockets are easiest to miss in large frontline and multi-site workforces, common in Egypt and the Gulf. Where disagreeing upward carries a cost, problems travel sideways rather than up, and a survey sent in English by corporate email misses the very people most likely to be living in the pocket.

What causes a toxic culture?

In a later article, Sull and Sull reviewed 11 meta-analyses on elements of toxic culture, from incivility to abusive supervision. The studies converged on three drivers: toxic leadership, toxic social norms and poor work design. Leaders' behaviour and team norms were about ten times more strongly related to experiencing toxic behaviour than an employee's age or seniority. Leadership was consistently the strongest predictor. In practice, those drivers show up in four ways.

• What leaders do. Senior leaders set the tone, and middle managers and supervisors create microcultures inside it. People watch what leaders pay attention to, how they react to a crisis, and whom they promote. Our explainer on the Schein model of organizational culture sets out those mechanisms.
• Rewards for results at any cost, and exemptions for stars. When the bonus pays for the number however it was reached, and the top performer is excused rules others follow, everyone learns fast. In the authors' survey of more than 16,000 respondents in 469 organisations, only 39% said leaders dealt promptly with people who hit their numbers but cut ethical corners. Fewer than one in five said top executives promptly and consistently dealt with leaders who delivered results but would not collaborate. Promoting such people into management spreads the problem.
• Unfair processes. People judge fairness by how decisions are made: who gets the assignment, the pay rise, the promotion, the second chance. Favouritism sits inside the noninclusive cluster for a reason.
• Toxic norms, stressful work and silence. Toxic norms spread at group level: rudeness invites retaliation and hardens into habit. Unclear roles, conflicting demands, red tape and overload raise stress, and stressed, exhausted managers are more likely to lapse into abuse. Meanwhile leaders overestimate their own record: top executives were 24% more likely to say they dealt with unethical behaviour quickly and consistently than middle managers were to say the top team did.

What does a toxic culture cost?

The most quoted figure needs careful reading. For April to September 2021, Sull, Sull and Zweig estimated attrition at large US companies relative to their industry, using 34 million online employee profiles, and counted people leaving for any reason, including retirement and layoffs. They then tested which of 172 culture topics in Glassdoor reviews best predicted it. A toxic culture was 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate compared with its industry; compensation ranked 16th.

It does not mean toxic companies lose ten times as many people, or that pay does not matter. It is predictive, not causal, it covers large US companies in one unusual period, and the authors run culture and workforce analytics businesses. Its direction is consistent with the rest of the research summarised here.

Our employee turnover calculator shows the working for the first row.

How do you fix a toxic work culture?

Start with the drivers, not a campaign. Posters about respect in a team run by an abusive manager teach people the organisation is not serious. Work in this order.

• Step 1: the top team owns it. Only the top team holds all the levers: hiring, promotion, budgets and measurement. Agree in writing what the leadership team will stop tolerating, and put the cost estimate above in front of it every quarter so the work stays on the agenda.
• Step 2: deal with results delivered the wrong way. One visible decision about a high performer who bullies teaches more than any training. Add how results were achieved to promotion and bonus criteria. Coach first: Sull and Sull treat dismissal as a last resort, and warn against labelling a manager toxic when they are blunt or demanding. Where coaching fails, act.
• Step 3: make the processes fair and visible. Publish the criteria for assignments, promotions and pay rises; use panels rather than one decision-maker; record the reasons; check outcomes by gender, nationality and site.
• Step 4: let teams rewrite their norms. Norms change at group level, not one person at a time. In the US Veterans Health Administration's CREW programme, intact work groups, typically of 10 to 15 people, meet weekly for six months to agree, test and track norms of respect. By 2022 it had reached more than 1,200 work groups. The authors note it works only when people choose to take part and have the time and staffing to do it.
• Step 5: redesign the work. Clarify roles, remove nuisance work such as red tape and missing resources, and give people more control over how they do their jobs.
• Step 6: build safe ways to speak up. Amy Edmondson's 1999 study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company described team psychological safety as a belief, shared by the team's members, that the team is "safe for interpersonal risk taking", and found it was associated with learning behaviour, which in turn was linked to team performance. Build it on purpose: leaders ask for disagreement by name, thank whoever brings bad news before asking who caused it, and offer one escalation route that bypasses the line manager.
• Step 7: listen anonymously, then act where people can see it. Use a survey people trust; our guide on whether employee surveys are anonymous explains what each kind of promise means. Then act: in Gallup's 2024 research, only 8% of employees strongly agreed that their organisation takes action on surveys.

For the wider sequence of culture change, see can organizational culture be changed.

How do you measure whether it is getting better?

Measure by team and by manager, with the same questions each time, and read numbers next to behaviour.

Expect the number of concerns to rise before it falls. When people start to believe speaking up is safe, more problems surface. Read that rise alongside the other indicators, not as failure. Repeat a full culture assessment about a year apart with the same instrument; our comparison of culture assessment tools helps you choose one.

GoldinKollar's culture work starts with finding the pockets: a culture audit of leadership interviews, focus groups in Arabic and English and a review of the decisions that actually govern behaviour, such as promotions, incentives and escalation records, alongside Persona Quest, a diagnostic that maps current against desired culture by unit and role. The Culture Leader Kit then gives managers the rituals and scripts to keep the change going. More on our organisational culture work.

What can you do if you work in a toxic culture?

This is general guidance, not legal advice.

• Write it down as it happens. Date, time, place, what was said or done, who was present, and how it affected your work. Keep notes somewhere personal, and copies of messages only in line with company policy. The record will show whether it is one incident or a pattern, and a pattern is far easier to act on.
• Raise it where action is most likely. That might be your manager's manager, HR, a formal grievance procedure, or an ethics or whistleblowing line. Read the policy first so you know what happens next, put the concern in writing, and ask what the next step is and when.
• Know that outside routes exist, and take advice before using them. For harassment, discrimination, safety or fraud, most countries have a labour authority, regulator or tribunal, but the rules, deadlines and protections differ widely. Speak to an employment lawyer, union or recognised advice service in your country first.
• Protect your health. See a doctor if work is affecting your sleep or health, use an employee assistance programme if there is one, and keep people outside work close.
• Decide your own line. Write down what would need to change for you to stay, and by when.

Frequently asked questions

What are examples of a toxic work culture?

A sales team where the top seller's bullying is ignored because of the numbers. A branch where the manager's favourites always get the shifts they want. A department where the person who reports a mistake is blamed for it. In each case the behaviour is only half of it; the other half is that people with power see it and let it continue.

Is a toxic boss the same as a toxic culture?

Not always. One abusive manager creates a toxic microculture inside an otherwise healthy organisation. It becomes the organisation's culture when leaders know and do nothing, protect the manager because of results, or promote them. Start with the team, but ask whether the organisation's response is the deeper problem.

How long does it take to fix a toxic culture?

There is no reliable universal timeline. One decision about a manager can change a team's climate within weeks; norms across a whole organisation take far longer, and the CREW programme ran for six months per team. Be wary of borrowed statistics too: the claim that 70% of change programmes fail is widely repeated, but a review of its sources found no valid empirical evidence for it (Hughes, 2011).

Can a successful company have a toxic culture?

Yes. Strong results can hide it for years, especially where the culture rewards results however they are reached. The cost arrives later: in who leaves, in problems that surface too late, in misconduct, and in what former employees tell candidates. The MIT research also found pockets of toxicity inside companies whose culture was healthy overall.

How do you tell a toxic culture from a bad fit?

A bad fit is a mismatch of preferences: the pace is faster, the structure tighter or the style more formal than suits you, and others thrive there without being harmed. A toxic culture harms people whatever their preferences: disrespect, exclusion, dishonesty, sabotage or abuse that would hurt anyone on the receiving end.

Sources

• Sull, D., Sull, C. and Zweig, B. (2022), "Toxic culture is driving the Great Resignation", MIT Sloan Management Review. sloanreview.mit.edu
• Sull, D., Sull, C., Cipolli, W. and Brighenti, C. (2022), "Why every leader needs to worry about toxic culture", MIT Sloan Management Review. sloanreview.mit.edu
• Sull, D. and Sull, C. (2022), "How to fix a toxic culture", MIT Sloan Management Review. sloanreview.mit.edu
• Edmondson, A. (1999), "Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams", Administrative Science Quarterly 44(2), 350-383. jstor.org
• Beck, R. and Harter, J. (2015), "Managers account for 70% of variance in employee engagement", Gallup. gallup.com
• McFeely, S. and Wigert, B. (2019), "This fixable problem costs U.S. businesses $1 trillion", Gallup. gallup.com
• Gallup (2024), "How action plans propel engagement", Gallup Workplace. gallup.com
• Hughes, M. (2011), "Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?", Journal of Change Management 11(4). research.brighton.ac.uk