Every workplace has them. The colleague who bad-mouths you behind your back at the water cooler. The boss who takes credit for everyone else’s ideas. The sexist jerk people actively avoid by taking circuitous routes to the printer and lying about their happy hour plans.
These employees are the bane of American enterprise, and they’re everywhere. Not only are they detrimental to a company’s morale, they are extremely costly to its bottom line and can do far more harm to an organization than outliers at the other extreme — the superstar employees — do good.
But who are these people? And how are they different from the rest of us?
In a provocative new Harvard Business School working paper, researchers Michael Housman and Dylan Minor crunched data from 50,000 employees at 11 companies to come up with what might be the world’s most detailed personality profile of a toxic worker.
Using information from a company that builds software designed by industrial-organizational psychologists to assess a job applicant’s fitness for a particular position, the researchers were able to gain an extraordinary window into a modern-day worker’s mind.
The job-testing program included questions from how they view their own abilities to their attitudes toward teamwork.
All of the workers in the study were employed in front-line service positions and paid on an hourly basis.
The study zeroed in on those at the most extreme of the extreme who were fired for their toxic behavior.
The study’s findings aren’t exactly what you might expect.
First, a toxic worker isn’t necessarily a lazy worker. In fact, they tend to be insanely productive, much more so than the average worker.
Housman, a workplace scientist at an analytics firm, and Minor, a visiting assistant professor at Harvard, explain that this might explain why these workers tend to persist in an organization despite their questionable ethics and morals: “There is a potential trade-off. … They are corrupt, but they excel in work performance.”
The second characteristic is a bit more obvious. They tend to have what’s known as high “self-regard” and a lower degree of “other-regardingness.”
Or put more simply, they’re selfish.
“All things equal, those that are less other-regarding should be more predisposed to toxicity as they do not fully internalize the cost that their behavior imposes on others,” the researchers wrote.
Third, the toxic employee also has an tendency to be overconfident of his or her own abilities, a trait thought to lead to unreasonable risk-taking.
“Someone that is overconfident believes the expected payoff from engaging in misconduct is higher than someone who is not overconfident, as they believe the likelihood of the better outcome is higher than it really is,” the researchers said.
Finally, if a person is dead-set on following rules, there might be reason to worry. Even though it seems counterintuitive, Housman and Minor said that those employees who said in the questionnaire that rules should always be followed with no exceptions (as opposed to those who said sometimes you have to break rules to do a good job) were the most likely to be terminated for breaking the rules.
“It could also be the case that those who claim the rules should be followed are more Machiavellian in nature, purporting to embrace whatever rules, characteristics or beliefs that they believe are most likely to obtain them a job,” they theorized.
What if you have some of these employees in your midst?
You needn’t despair that your organization is doomed. According to their research, the factors that lead to a potentially toxic worker to act in a toxic way are likely to be numerous and complex and isn’t all about fixed personality traits.
