What Is a Toxic Work Culture, Really?
You hear the term toxic work culture everywhere,
but what does it actually mean?
Most people associate toxicity with bad bosses or difficult colleagues. But these are symptoms, not the cause. According to a 2024 conceptual review by Priesemuth and Schminke in the Journal of Applied Psychology, toxic work culture is not about isolated behaviours. It’s about shared perceptions of hostility ingrained into the everyday norms, policies, and leadership behaviours of an organisation.
In short: toxic culture is systemic.
What defines a toxic work culture?
Priesemuth and Schminke define it as a workplace climate where hostility is perceived to be widespread and normalised. It's not about one-off incidents. It’s about patterns - recurring behaviours that people come to expect and accept, even when those behaviours are harmful.
A toxic work culture often includes:
Undermining leadership
When leaders model passive-aggressive behaviour or take credit for others' work, it sends a clear message: this is acceptable here.Normalised exclusion
Cliques, gossip, and closed-door conversations lead to distrust. Over time, this creates a culture where people protect themselves by withdrawing.Silencing dissent
Employees stop speaking up, not because they have nothing to say, but because they’ve learned it won’t make a difference.
The impact of toxic culture
Once these dynamics take hold, they affect everything:
Impact Area | Consequence |
|---|---|
Morale | Low motivation, increased burnout |
Collaboration | Breakdown in communication and trust |
Productivity | Reduced efficiency and missed goals |
Retention | High turnover, loss of institutional knowledge |
What’s worse, surface-level solutions don’t work. A leadership reshuffle or new values statement won’t fix anything if the deeper norms and systems stay the same.
Why this matters
If you’re leading or supporting a team, it’s not enough to target individuals. You need to examine how your organisation’s practices reinforce toxic dynamics.
That means asking:
What behaviour gets rewarded here?
Who gets listened to, and who doesn’t?
How do power and influence actually operate?
Changing a toxic culture requires structural and psychological work: resetting expectations, shifting norms, and building real psychological safety. That’s the focus of my doctoral research - looking beyond individuals to understand the cultural conditions that allow bullying, exclusion, and moral disengagement to flourish.
Final thoughts
Toxicity isn’t just “bad behaviour.” It’s a system problem. And systems can be redesigned, but only if we stop pretending it's about a few bad apples.
What have you seen that contributes to a toxic culture? What’s made a real difference where you work?
Reference
Priesemuth, M., & Schminke, M. (2024). Toxic work climates: An integrative review and development of a new construct and theoretical framework. Journal of Applied Psychology, 109(9), 1355–1376. Read it here.
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