Toxic Workplace!
Author
Mitchell Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway
Subtitle
Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power
Quick Facts
Authors: Mitchell Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway
Genre: Workplace Culture, Leadership, Organizational Behavior, Conflict Management
Published: 2009
Best For: Leaders, employees, educators, administrators, HR professionals, wellness advocates, and anyone navigating an unhealthy workplace culture
Core Themes: Toxic behavior, workplace culture, leadership, incivility, bullying, team sabotage, organizational systems, respectful engagement
The book examines behaviors including shaming, passive hostility, team sabotage, abuse of authority, and other forms of workplace toxicity. Importantly, the authors don't look only at the difficult individual—they examine the organizational systems that allow those behaviors to survive and spread.
What It's About
Sometimes we describe a workplace as toxic and immediately focus on one person.
The difficult coworker.
The controlling supervisor.
The leader who tears people down.
But Toxic Workplace! asks us to look beyond the individual.
Kusy and Holloway explore how toxic personalities affect the people around them, but they also examine something just as important: the systems that allow toxic behavior to continue.
Because harmful workplace behavior doesn't exist in isolation.
It can grow when people are afraid to speak up. It can continue when leaders look the other way. It can become normalized when inappropriate behavior repeatedly goes unaddressed. And eventually, what began with one person's behavior can affect an entire team's energy, trust, morale, and sense of well-being.
That is what makes this book different from simply learning how to “deal with difficult people.”
It asks organizations to consider:
What are we allowing to become normal here?
Why We Recommend It
At SILWELL-C, we believe healthy workplace culture requires more than asking employees to learn how to cope with unhealthy behavior.
This book encourages readers to:
Recognize behaviors that can damage workplace culture
Understand how toxicity can spread beyond one individual
Examine the role organizational systems play in allowing harmful behavior to continue
Recognize the impact toxic behavior can have on teams and individual well-being
Consider how leaders can create stronger norms around respect and accountability
Move toward workplaces built around what the authors describe as respectful engagement
Sometimes the problem isn't simply that a toxic person exists.
The bigger problem is what happens when an organization continually makes room for the behavior.
Get the Book
📚 Get your copy on Amazon:
Toxic Workplace! on Amazon
Pair It With
🌿 Pair it with:The Burnout Challenge by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Toxic Workplace! helps readers recognize damaging behaviors and the organizational systems that can sustain them, while The Burnout Challenge examines workplace conditions that contribute to burnout.
Together, they shift an important question from:
“What's wrong with the employee?”
to:
“What's happening in the environment?”
SILWELL-C Reflection Prompt
“What behaviors have we become so accustomed to in our workplace that we no longer stop to ask whether they should be acceptable?”
