Narcissistic Bosses That Are Not Exactly Alike In Every Workplace Share Many Similarities
In a previous post, we described why toxic work culture can sometimes become irremediable to the point that not only employee turnover rate dramatically increases but the founder would himself want to leave the workplace. A toxic workplace culture rarely emerges overnight or after a given event. By the time toxicity becomes noticeable little would be left to correct parameters that have been neglected over a long period. So when we look at a toxic workplace and try to figure out what’s wrong with it we are looking at the consequences not the cause of damage. The situation is very much similar to a World War II situation when the allies thought to strengthen fighter planes’ parts that were filled with holes as a result of dog fights after returning from encounters with the enemy. Until they realized that perhaps certain parts of the planes that were not covered with bullet holes would constitute the critical areas for planes that did not return and need to be strengthened instead. In other words, if we can identify mistakes that lead to toxicity emergence we will be able to strengthen our practice where it needs to be strengthened.
Best-selling author and Wharton University Professor, Adam Grant underlines that in every workplace, toxic work culture is always about the lack of balance between the 4Rs relationships versus results and rules versus risks. Any shift towards one side of those parameters of competing values will cause toxicity to merge in the workplace.
According to Grant putting too much emphasis on any of the 4Rs means committing one of the four deadly sins of workplace culture:
When the emphasis in the workplace is on relationships, the culture shifts to a culture without accountability where everyone can do whatever he likes, and even if terrible things happen he can still move on because everyone else is simply like him.
When the emphasis is on Results, very little importance is given to relationships, human decency vanishes, and to increase performance, the workplace culture turns into an environment with strange behaviors that are full of disrespect, abuse, and immoral judgments.
When the emphasis is on rules, regulations and laws may break the balance between the return and risks. Pushing rules and laws too far forward will end up killing innovation, creativity, and initiative giving way to added bureaucracy to emphasize risk aversion.
When the emphasis is on risk, rules become absent, everyone will do whatever they want without coordinating with others leading to wasted efforts because people will have different objectives that may compete with others’ projects resulting in rule-free Anarchy that only generates chaos.