4: So What Does ‘Toxic Human Behaviour’ Look Like in Real Workplace Life?

In this chapter, we will make a start on looking at what constitutes toxic human behaviour in the workplace and continue our investigation in subsequent chapters.

In conversations with different people, I asked what a toxic workplace means to them. Here are some comments to set the stage for this chapter.

From the many conversations I have had with different people about the nature of toxic workplaces, my sense is that toxicity in organisations exists on a continuum: in other words – and perhaps not surprisingly – toxicity comes in varying degrees of intensity. In terms of getting an idea of what this continuum might look like, I have taken the amazing and highly perceptive work of the psychologist and scholar, Simon Baron Cohen, as a starting point for the concept of an ‘Empathy-Toxicity Spectrum’. Baron Cohen is the author of a number of publications including The Science of Evil which is an examination of the nature of evil framed as a lack of empathy occurring in varying degrees and with different layers of complexity. Table 3 shows Baron Cohen's set of six levels of empathy starting with Level 0 (where the person has no empathy at all) to Level 6 which is where you find people who are exceptionally empathetic. I was particularly taken by Baron Cohen's thinking around the fundamental meaning of the word ‘evil’, given that ‘evil’ covers a wide range of things. As a word, according to Baron Cohen and paraphrased here, ‘evil’ does not really give us the level of granularity to be able to fully understand the degree of evil evident in a particular person or how exactly we might describe a heinous act. So, looking at ‘evil’ through the prism of ‘levels of empathy’ allows us to leverage a wide variety of data-driven insights from psychological surveys of people and their personalities and psychiatric research which in turn enables us to identify just how empathetic or lacking in empathy a person is. Of course, we do know that in the case of psychopaths, eliciting responses around what they think or feel about something is always going to be a challenge, given the typical behaviour of psychopaths which is to lie and obfuscate. This is why tests such as Robert Hare's Psychopath Test (the PCL-R) can help zero in on psychopathic traits that enable an accurate picture of an individual on a psychopathy scale even if we cannot elicit anything conclusive from an actual conversation with that person.