There are many organizations where people do not leave immediately, but gradually stop participating fully. They continue to complete their tasks, attend meetings, and comply with formal requirements, yet they begin to think carefully about what they say, what they propose, and how safe it is to express a different opinion.
A toxic work environment does not always begin with open conflict. Sometimes it begins with silence.
The problem arises when favoritism, humiliation, taking credit for others' work, withholding information, aggressive communication, and punishing disagreement stop being isolated incidents and become a persistent pattern of behavior. At that point, the issue is no longer difficult relationships between particular individuals. It has become part of the organizational culture.
How a Toxic Environment Becomes an Organizational Pattern
Research shows that in toxic environments, employees increasingly limit upward feedback because they perceive it as risky or pointless. This creates organizational silence. Problems are downplayed, poor decisions go unchallenged, and important information fails to reach those responsible for making decisions (Brindha et al., 2026).
To management, such an organization may even appear calm. But the absence of open disagreement does not necessarily indicate trust. Sometimes it simply means that people have learned when it is wiser to remain silent.
The Role of Leadership in Sustaining Toxicity
A particularly revealing study by Wechtler, Boedker, and Connell examined 1,192 employees in Australia. The authors found a positive relationship between perceived psychopathic traits in leaders' behavior and emotional exhaustion among subordinates. The effect was stronger among employees in higher managerial positions, showing that higher status does not always provide greater protection from toxic leadership (Wechtler et al., 2025).
A manager who works directly under a destructive senior leader cannot easily distance themselves. They are responsible for results, people, budgets, and their own professional reputation. Toxic leadership should therefore not be viewed solely as a matter of personality or management style. Under certain conditions, it becomes an organizational psychosocial risk.
What Positive Organizational Psychology Contributes
Positive psychology has an important role here, but not in the sense of encouraging more optimism, motivational messages, or training employees to tolerate greater pressure.
The more important question is how an organization can create conditions in which people can perform well without constantly spending energy protecting themselves from internal conflict, unfairness, or fear.
Gonzalez-Morales (2026) contrasts what she calls Toxic Power Cultures with Brave Relational Cultures. The former are dominated by power dynamics, internal competition, and the suppression of dissenting views. The latter place greater value on trust, psychological safety, mutuality, and development through high-quality relationships.
This distinction matters because a positive organizational environment is not created by persuading people to think more positively. It is created through a different approach to management.
How the Real Organizational Culture Can Be Recognized
Almost every large organization has formal values such as trust, respect, integrity, collaboration, and innovation. But the real culture is revealed in other ways.
What happens when someone makes a mistake? Does the organization look for the cause or for someone to blame? Can a junior specialist tell a director that they disagree? How does a leader respond to critical feedback? What happens to a high-performing employee who consistently damages relationships within the team?
These situations show what the organization actually values.
If mistakes lead to humiliation, people begin to hide them. If disagreement leads to sanctions, people begin to remain silent. If toxic behavior is tolerated because someone delivers strong results, the organization itself is demonstrating which behavior it truly rewards.
For this reason, transforming organizational culture cannot be limited to new messages, training programs, or corporate values. It requires changing which behaviors are tolerated, recognized, and rewarded.
Psychological Safety as a Condition for Openness
Psychological safety does not mean an environment without conflict or high expectations. It means that a person can say, “I disagree,” “I made a mistake,” or “This process is not working,” without fearing that those words will later be used against them.
This is particularly important for organizations that expect innovation. New ideas are inherently uncertain. If people are afraid of being wrong, they will gradually stop proposing ideas that have not yet been proven.
How Employees Adapt to a Toxic Environment
Bansal et al. (2026) examine a behavior known as grey rocking. It involves deliberately limiting emotional reactions, avoiding provocation, and reducing communication with conflict-prone or manipulative individuals to what is necessary. The authors found an association between this behavior, workplace toxicity, and employee disengagement, while explicitly noting that the findings indicate associations rather than causality.
For an individual, this type of distancing may be temporarily useful. For the organization, however, it is a warning sign. If employees must systematically limit their emotional involvement in order to remain functional, the problem is no longer an individual one.
A similar conclusion appears in the study by Rosada and colleagues involving university lecturers. A toxic work environment was associated with higher stress, while the spiritual resource examined in the study supported coping with workload but did not significantly neutralize the impact of toxic interpersonal relationships (Rosada et al., 2026).
This points to something essential: not every organizational problem should be shifted onto the individual resilience of the employee.
Sometimes the person does not need to be trained to endure more. The environment needs to change.
Where Real Change Begins
Transformation begins when the organization clearly demonstrates which behaviors it values and which behaviors it will no longer accept.
If developing others, sharing knowledge, constructive disagreement, and building trust become genuine criteria for evaluation and professional development, the culture gradually begins to change (Gonzalez-Morales, 2026).
Employees then do not simply hear new messages. They see new rules being applied in practice.
The Role of Change Management in Cultural Transformation
This is where Change Management has its proper place. It is not the cultural change itself, but the systematic approach through which an organization moves from its current state to a desired future state.
When organizational culture is the object of change, change management must connect leadership, behavior, communication, performance evaluation systems, people development, and feedback mechanisms.
Without this connection, change remains declarative. With it, change begins to become a new way of working.
Why Change Must Begin with Leadership
HR can support the process. Consultants can help structure it. Teams can build healthier relationships. But without the participation of those who hold real authority, cultural change is difficult to sustain.
Leadership must demonstrate that the rules are genuinely different. Leaders must acknowledge mistakes, protect reasoned disagreement, refuse to allow strong performance to excuse destructive behavior, and ensure that critical information can move upward without fear.
Gradually, the question changes.
Instead of: “How should the employee deal with a difficult manager?”
the organization should ask:
“What in our system allows this behavior to continue?”
What a Healthier Organizational Culture Looks Like
A healthy organizational culture does not mean the absence of tension, criticism, or difficult decisions.
It means enough trust to allow disagreement, enough professionalism to accept criticism, enough safety to acknowledge mistakes, and leadership mature enough not to treat a different opinion as a personal threat.
Perhaps the most useful question for any leadership team is this:
What do people learn about our organization from what we reward, what we punish, and what we choose not to notice?
The answer reveals the real organizational culture.
And change management begins when the organization is ready not only to hear that answer, but also to change the system that created it.
References
Bansal, R., Murthy, Y. S., Shharma, P. C., Pruthi, N., Aziz, A. L., & Propheto, A. (2026). Exploring grey rocking as a mediator between employee intelligence and disengagement in toxic work climates. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 12, 100761. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joitmc.2026.100761
Brindha, S., Bhalla, R., & Rani, J. (2026). Toxic workplace dynamics: Adverse effects on employee mental health of poor upward feedback systems shaped by toxic leaders and employees. Northern Economic Review, 17(1), 459–474. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22673221
Gonzalez-Morales, M. G. (2026). From toxic to brave organizations: Transforming power cultures into relational cultures. Organizational Dynamics, 55, 101203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2025.101203
Rosada, R. S., Suliyanto, S., Wening, N., & Pariyanti, E. (2026). The impact of toxic workplace environment, work role overload, and financial anxiety on workplace stress: Islamic workplace spirituality as a buffer. KONSELOR, 15(2), 200–212. https://doi.org/10.24036/02026152195-0-86
Wechtler, H., Boedker, C., & Connell, J. (2025). Leader psychopathy and workplace emotional exhaustion: An illustration of uneven distribution of psychosocial hazards within organisations. Safety Science, 184, 106756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106756
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