Toxic Workplace! E-Book

Mitchell Kusy

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 295

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

"The day this person left our company is considered an annual holiday!" THIS QUOTE, taken from Kusy and Holloway's research on toxic personalities, echoes the frustration and confusion that come from working with or managing an extremely difficult person. Just one toxic person has the capacity to debilitate individuals, teams, and even organizations. Toxic Workplace! is the first book to tackle the underlying systems issues that enable a toxic person to create a path of destruction in an organization, pervading others' thoughts and energies, even undermining their very sense of well-being. Based on all-new research with over 400 leaders, many from the Fortune 500 list, this book illustrates how to manage existing toxic behaviors, create norms that prevent the growth or regrowth of toxic environments, and ultimately design organizational communities of respectful engagement. Kusy and Holloway's research reveals the warning signs that indicate a serious behavioral problem and identifies how this toxicity spreads in systems with long-term effects on organizational climate, even after the person has left. Their two-year, cutting-edge research study provides very specific actions that leaders need to take to reduce both the intensity and frequency of toxic personalities at work. No other book provides this menu of options from a systems perspective with practical relevance in real work situations. You'll learn how to identify the toxic personality and describe the leader reactions and approaches that typically don't work. Toxic Workplace! provides hands-on approaches that work with research-based strategies at the individual, team, and organizational level.Toxic Workplace! will provide new insights on how leaders lead, how organizational cultures sustain themselves, and how teams deal with toxic personalities.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Toxic Workplace!

Part One - Understanding Toxic People and Toxic Environments

Chapter 1 - THE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL COSTS OF WORKING WITH TOXIC PEOPLE

The Ubiquity of Toxic People

Why We Wrote This Book

How We Researched the Problem of Toxic Personalities at Work

Toxic People Thrive Only in a Toxic System

The Hidden Chunk of the Toxic Iceberg

The Hidden Costs of Uncivil Behavior

The Hidden Costs of Bullying

Why Not Just Fire Toxic People?

Summing Up

Chapter 2 - RECOGNIZING THE TOXIC PERSONALITY

Three Types of Toxic Behaviors That Drive People to Distraction

How These Behaviors Work Together to Keep Toxicity in Place

The Two Faces of Toxic People: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Toxic Behavior Can Literally Make People Sick

Summing Up: It’s the Behavior That Matters

Chapter 3 - LEADER REACTIONS AND STRATEGIES THAT TYPICALLY DON’T WORK

How Leaders Typically React to Toxic People

Unsuccessful Reaction 1: Adjust or Leave, and Why These Don’t Work

Unsuccessful Reaction 2: Reconfigure the Situation, and Why This Doesn’t Work

Summing Up Unsuccessful Reactions

Strategies Leaders Use to Deal with Toxic People

Why Feedback Strategies Don’t Often Change Toxic Behavior

Why Informal Strategies Don’t Change Toxic Behavior

Why Formal Strategies Don’t Change Toxic Behaviors

Summing Up Formal Strategies

Chapter 4 - ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Evaluate Your Organization’s Culture

Summing Up

Part Two - The Toxic Organization Change System Model

Chapter 5 - ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES Dealing with Toxicity at the Highest ...

Formally Integrating Values into Your Organizational System

Summing Up

Chapter 6 - TEAM STRATEGIES Dealing with Toxicity at the Team Level

Proactive Strategies to Deal with Toxicity at the Team Level

Developing Team Values Without Clearly Defined Organizational Values

Summary of Team Interventions

Chapter 7 - INDIVIDUAL STRATEGIES

Strategy 1: Managing a Toxic Individual’s Performance by Providing Targeted Feedback

Strategy 2: Using Performance Appraisals to Integrate Values

Strategy 3: Coaching

Strategy 4: When All Else Fails: Terminate the Toxic Individual

Conclusion

Chapter 8 - MYTHS AND TRUTHS ABOUT TOXICITY - AND RENEWAL FROM A TOXIC ENVIRONMENT

Myths and Truths

Fostering Renewal from Toxicity for the Leader and Team

Our Final Words

Appendix A - OUR RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Appendix B - NATIONAL SURVEY RESPONSES ON TOXIC BEHAVIORS

Notes

The Authors

Index

Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kusy, Mitchell.

Toxic workplace! : managing toxic personalities and their systems of power / Mitchell E. Kusy and Elizabeth L. Holloway.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-46460-1

1. Problem employees. 2. Interpersonal conflict. 3. Conflict management. 4. Personnel management. I. Holloway, Elizabeth. II. Title.

HF5549.5.E42K87 2009

658.3’045—dc22

2008055671

HB Printing

To all those who have suffered from the effects of toxic behaviors at work. And to the leaders who told us their stories in hope of finding paths to respectful engagement in their organizations and communities.

Toxic Workplace!

“The day this person left our organization is considered an annual holiday!”

Part One

Understanding Toxic People and Toxic Environments

Before you can solve a problem, you have to fully understand it. Therefore, the chapters in Part One examine in depth toxic people—those who do damage to their coworkers, staffs, bosses, and customers. Chapter One describes the significant organizational losses, human and financial, that these people cause. Because recognizing toxicity is not easy, Chapter Two describes the types of toxic behavior, from humiliating others to sabotaging team efforts. Chapter Three identifies strategies that don’t work in dealing with toxic people so you won’t waste your time on these! And Chapter Four shows how toxicity spreads like an infection in organizations.

1

THE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL COSTS OF WORKING WITH TOXIC PEOPLE

Toxic Behaviors Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Working with this toxic individual was one of the worst experiences in mylife. It took a long time to recover from her abuse. It was difficult becauseothers witnessed what was happening but were scared they might receive thesame abuse so they did not want to get involved.

—Quote from study respondent

You have probably picked up this book because you are either suffering or have suffered the ravages of a toxic personality at work. Most people have. Does the opening quotation from our national study on toxic personalities, in which we interviewed and surveyed more than four hundred leaders, hit close to home? Maybe it resurrects memories of your own gut-wrenching experiences with toxic personalities at work

Most of us have experienced the frustration and confusion of having an extremely difficult person to deal with in the workplace. Call them what you will: control freaks, narcissists, manipulators, bullies, poisonous individuals, or humiliators, to name just a few of the descriptors that we heard during our interviews. And we have heard other terms in our consulting practices and our research that describe what these people do: poison, corrupt, pollute, and contaminate. This is not your common, everyday variety of difficult person who gets on your nerves occasionally but without lasting effects. Instead, based on our research, we define the toxic personality as anyone who demonstrates a pattern of counterproductive work behaviors that debilitate individuals, teams, and even organizations over the long term.