 David DeLong | |  |
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| |  | | | Toxic Workers -- Harvard Business School Working Paper | While there has been a strong focus in past research on discovering and developing topperformers in the workplace, less attention has been paid to the question of how to managethose workers on the opposite side of the spectrum: those who are harmful to organizationalperformance. In extreme cases, aside from hurting performance, such workers can generateenormous regulatory and legal fees and liabilities for the Örm. We explore a large novel datasetof over 50,000 workers across 11 di§erent Örms to document a variety of aspects of workersícharacteristics and circumstances that lead them to engage in what we call "toxic" behavior.We also explore the relationship between toxicity and productivity, and the ripple e§ect that atoxic worker has on her peers. Finally, we Önd that avoiding a toxic worker (or converting himto an average worker) enhances performance to a much greater extent than replacing an averageworker with a superstar worker.
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Given how lean organizations are today, managers have to be highly concerned about the impact of "toxic" workers. This new study looks at a huge data set to tease out their characteristics, impacts and suggests some strategies for dealing with them. |
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