Are Toxic Colleagues the Problem, or Is the Workplace Creating Them?
- Jul 17
- 10 min read
Justine Asante is a leadership identity architect, author, and developer of the Performance-to-Power Evolution®. Her work examines authority stabilization in high-achieving women leaders and how performance-based environments condition women to trade self-possession for approval, output, and over-responsibility.
Workplace conflict is often blamed on one difficult employee. A manager is called controlling. A colleague is described as territorial. A senior leader is accused of being demanding, defensive, or impossible to satisfy. Once the organization labels that person as toxic, the explanation feels complete.
The person becomes the problem, and removing the person becomes the solution.
Sometimes, that conclusion is accurate. Bullying, intimidation, discrimination, retaliation, humiliation, and manipulation require direct intervention. Leaders must address harmful behavior clearly, and no discussion of workplace systems should be used to excuse someone who is abusing authority or causing harm.
However, organizations often stop their examination too soon. They focus on the individual without asking what the role requires, which behaviors are rewarded, how mistakes are handled, and why similar problems continue after one employee leaves and another takes the same position.
When different people enter the same role and eventually begin behaving in similar ways, leaders must consider whether the workplace is contributing to the problem.
When the same behavior keeps returning
Consider a department manager who reviews every document before it reaches a client. Her employees describe her as controlling because they cannot complete their work without her approval. Over time, they stop making independent decisions because they expect her to revise or reject what they produce.
Her behavior is affecting the team, and she remains responsible for addressing it. However, the environment surrounding her also deserves attention. She is personally blamed for every error, two positions on her team have remained vacant for months, and senior leaders rarely acknowledge the work that goes well. The last time a client complained, her competence was questioned in front of other executives.
Under those conditions, excessive control can become a form of self-protection. The behavior is still damaging, but it did not develop without context.
The same pattern appears when employees refuse to share information. An organization may describe them as territorial, but they may have learned that being the only person who understands an important process makes them harder to replace. A leader may attend every meeting because significant decisions are made in informal conversations, and being absent means losing influence. An executive may remain online late into the night because she has watched colleagues with stronger boundaries lose access to opportunities.
The behavior belongs to the individual, but the conditions shaping that behavior belong to the organization.
Leaders should become especially curious when several people struggle in the same position. If three directors have resigned from one department within five years, the organization should examine more than its hiring decisions. If each person became overwhelmed, defensive, or controlling, the role may involve unrealistic expectations, insufficient authority, or an unmanageable workload.
Replacing the employee may offer temporary relief, but it will not repair a poorly designed job.
Employees learn culture through consequences
Organizations rarely tell employees that they should answer messages during dinner, work while on vacation, or accept every assignment without questioning capacity. These expectations are often communicated without being written into policy.
Employees learn the real culture by observing what happens around them. They notice who receives recognition, who gets promoted, whose mistakes are forgiven, and whose mistakes become evidence that they are not ready for leadership. They see which employees are praised for working through the weekend and which employees are quietly judged when they protect their personal time.
A chief executive can speak about employee well-being during a company meeting and send a nonessential email close to midnight. The email will teach employees more about the culture than the speech.
A company can offer unlimited vacation while managers question the commitment of employees who take time away. A healthcare organization can promote self-care while maintaining schedules that barely allow clinicians time to eat. A nonprofit can speak about sustainable leadership while depending on a few deeply committed employees to cover vacant positions for months.
In each case, the public message conflicts with the operating reality. Employees adapt to the reality because that is where the consequences exist.
Culture is not defined by the values listed on an organization’s website. It is shaped by what leaders reward, tolerate, model, and repeatedly allow.
This is why a wellness program cannot compensate for workloads that consistently require twelve-hour days. A resilience workshop cannot resolve a structure that gives managers responsibility without authority. Encouraging employees to establish boundaries will have little effect when the people with the weakest boundaries are treated as the most dependable.
How Performative Productivity® takes hold
I use the term Performative Productivity® to describe what happens when visible effort becomes proof of value, legitimacy, or commitment, even when that effort does not improve the quality of the work.
In workplaces shaped by Performative Productivity®, employees feel pressure to display how much they are doing, how quickly they respond, how full their calendars are, and how willing they are to remain available.
A crowded schedule begins to signal importance. A late night response begins to signal dedication. Accepting additional work without discussing capacity begins to signal leadership potential. The employee who repeatedly rescues poorly planned projects becomes known as dependable, while the employee who questions why every project has become an emergency may be viewed as difficult.
The central question changes from whether the work mattered to whether the right people saw how hard someone worked.
That shift influences how people lead. A manager whose value depends on being indispensable may resist delegation. A leader who receives recognition for rescuing projects may continue allowing those projects to reach a crisis. An employee who believes job security depends on being the only person with critical knowledge may be reluctant to train anyone else.
Even positive recognition can reinforce unhealthy conditions. Calling someone a “rock star” because she repeatedly works beyond her capacity may sound appreciative, but it can also hide a staffing problem. Praising an employee for working during vacation may reward one person while warning everyone else that time away carries a professional cost.
What appears to be dedication may be a workplace surviving by consuming the people most willing to give more.
Over time, work becomes more than a place where employees contribute their skills. It becomes the place where they prove they deserve trust, status, security, and belonging.
When performance becomes tied to identity, ordinary workplace choices become emotionally loaded. Delegation can feel like becoming less valuable. Rest can feel irresponsible. Saying no can feel like risking future opportunities. Establishing a reasonable boundary can feel like admitting that someone else may be more committed.
Why boundary advice often fails
Employees are often told to manage their time, protect their calendars, and communicate their limits. That advice sounds practical, but it may ignore the consequences employees have already witnessed.
A person can be told to disconnect after work, but that person may know that senior leaders favor employees who respond immediately. A manager can be encouraged to delegate, but she may remain personally accountable for every outcome. An executive can be told to protect her health, but her reputation may have been built on being available whenever the organization calls.
These employees are not always struggling because they lack discipline or time management skills. They may be responding to a clear system of rewards and penalties.
Leaders cannot ask employees to establish boundaries while continuing to reward the people who ignore them. If the organization wants different behavior, it must change the conditions that make the current behavior feel necessary.
Structural causes do not excuse harmful behavior
Understanding workplace conditions does not remove personal responsibility. A manager who humiliates employees remains accountable for that conduct. An executive who retaliates against disagreement should face consequences. A colleague who withholds information to maintain power is still making a choice that affects other people.
The mistake is not holding individuals accountable. The mistake is treating individual accountability as the complete solution.
An organization may remove a harmful leader while preserving the same workload, staffing shortage, unclear authority, and punishment for mistakes. A replacement may arrive with strong intentions and a collaborative approach, only to become increasingly controlling as the demands of the role close in.
This pattern is common in departments with chronic turnover. Each new leader is introduced as the person who will stabilize the team. Within several months, that leader is working long hours, making too many decisions, and frustrating employees. When the leader eventually leaves, the organization concludes that the person was not the right fit.
After several people have failed in the same role, “fit” is no longer a sufficient explanation.
Leaders need to examine whether the role carries responsibility without authority. They need to determine whether the department has enough staff, whether priorities are clear, and whether competing expectations can realistically be met. They also need to examine whether every meaningful decision must pass through one person.
A poorly designed role can make a capable person appear ineffective. An impossible role can turn a thoughtful leader into someone who checks every detail because each failure carries a cost that the organization expects that person to absorb alone.
Workload problems are often mistaken for attitude problems
A team may be described as disorganized when five employees are carrying work designed for eight. A manager may be criticized for failing to delegate when no one on the team has enough capacity to receive additional work. An employee may appear resistant to change because every new initiative is added without an existing responsibility being removed.
Many organizations continue adding priorities without deciding what should stop. Every request is urgent, and each assignment comes from someone senior. Employees are told to prioritize, but the people with authority refuse to determine which work will not be completed.
The most responsible employees often absorb the conflict. They work later, rush decisions, and become less patient. They stop asking for clarification because the conversation itself requires time they no longer have.
The organization then evaluates their behavior without examining the workload that shaped it.
Decision making structures can create similar problems. Many workplaces ask employees to take ownership while requiring approval for almost every meaningful choice. People are held accountable for results but denied the authority needed to produce them.
This arrangement creates delays and dependency. Employees stop acting because they expect to be overruled. Managers become bottlenecks because nothing can move without their permission. Senior leaders complain that employees lack initiative while continuing to reserve every consequential decision for themselves.
The organization then blames employees for adapting to the limits it created.
One question can reveal the real workplace culture
Leaders often ask employees whether they understand the organization’s values. A more revealing question is, “What do you believe you must do to be seen as successful here?”
Employees may say they need to respond immediately, even when a message is not urgent. They may believe they must agree publicly with senior leaders and raise concerns only in private. They may feel pressure to attend meetings where they have no clear role because absence could be interpreted as disengagement.
Some employees may say that vacation is permitted, but that they should remain reachable. Others may believe that admitting they are overwhelmed will be treated as evidence that they are not ready for leadership. Some may explain that the safest path to advancement is to become the person who always says yes.
These answers describe the workplace employees actually experience.
Leaders may insist that they never asked anyone to respond late at night or work during vacation. However, culture is not shaped only by direct instructions. It is shaped by what people observe, what they fear, what receives recognition, and what they believe will happen if they behave differently.
Repeated consequences carry more weight than stated intentions.
Culture changes when the rules of success change
Organizations cannot create healthier behavior by asking employees to change while leaving the same incentives in place. The expectations, rewards, and operating practices surrounding that behavior must also change.
Managers need enough authority to influence the outcomes for which they are responsible. Teams need workloads that match available staffing. Leaders need to distinguish genuine emergencies from work made urgent by delayed decisions, poor planning, or unclear ownership.
Promotion decisions should recognize leaders who develop other people and distribute knowledge. A manager who creates a team that can operate without constant oversight may appear less indispensable, but that is often evidence of effective leadership.
Good leadership should reduce unnecessary dependence rather than create more of it.
Organizations also need to examine how they respond to sacrifice. When an employee works through the weekend to meet a deadline, appreciation may be appropriate, but praise should not end the conversation. Leaders should ask why the work required a weekend, when the timeline became unrealistic, which decisions were delayed, and what needs to change before the next deadline.
Without that examination, the organization celebrates the rescue while preserving the conditions that caused the crisis.
Boundaries must also become visible through leadership behavior. Executives who do not expect late night replies can schedule nonurgent emails to arrive during business hours. Managers can clarify when a response is required instead of allowing every message to carry the same level of urgency. Teams can define what qualifies as an emergency and decide in advance who is responsible when one occurs.
These practices may appear small, but they shape whether employees experience the workplace as predictable or threatening.
Leaders must examine the person and the workplace
The language of toxicity can be useful when it accurately identifies harmful conduct. It becomes less useful when it allows the organization to place every problem inside one person.
A credible response requires two forms of accountability. Individuals must answer for how they use authority and how their behavior affects others. Organizations must answer for the workloads, incentives, reporting structures, and leadership practices that influence how people behave.
The most useful question is not only, “How should we manage this difficult employee?” Leaders must also ask, “What has this workplace taught people they must do to remain valued, protected, and successful?”
The answer may expose understaffing, unclear decision making authority, inconsistent leadership, or a promotion system that rewards visible sacrifice more than sound judgment. It may reveal that some employees are not resisting change because they are difficult. They may be protecting themselves from consequences that leaders have not acknowledged.
Before labeling another employee toxic, leaders should examine the pattern surrounding that person.
When a healthy and capable person enters a role, does the organization allow that person to remain healthy and capable? Or does the workplace gradually teach that person to overwork, control information, avoid risk, and protect personal standing?
Sometimes the individual is the problem. At other times, the organization is looking at behavior that its own structure helped create.
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Read more from Justine Asante
Justine Asante, Leadership Identity Architect
Justine Asante is a leadership identity architect, author, and developer of the Performance-to-Power Evolution®. Her work examines how Performative Productivity® begins before a woman’s career, shaped by family systems, generational expectations, cultural conditioning, and early praise for being capable, responsible, and easy to rely on. As women advance, performance-based environments reinforce this identity by rewarding over-functioning and constant output as excellence. Asante reframes burnout as authority erosion and actively recalibrates high-achieving women leaders from externally regulated performance into sustainable authority, where ambition, power, wellbeing, self-possession, and effectiveness coexist.
