Is Your Manager Toxic, or Is It Your Workplace?
Updated: 6 days ago
Shahrukh Khan, DBA Candidate, MBA, QArb., is an arbitration and mediation professional, labour relations specialist, and academic leader focused on workplace dispute resolution and policy compliance. His research and practice advance DEI, talent management, legislative compliance, and leadership strategy in higher education and industry.
Workplace conflict is not always as simple as identifying one difficult manager. Sometimes the behavior employees experience is shaped by deeper organizational pressures, unclear structures, and unhealthy workplace norms.
The easiest person to blame is the closest one
Workplace conflict is rarely simple, although we usually treat it that way. Something goes wrong at work, and we look for the nearest person to pin it on, the supervisor who keeps questioning our work, the manager who suddenly starts checking everything we do, the colleague who has become unusually interested in how we spend our time, the leader who has opinions about our communication style, our lunch hour, and whether we are really the right fit for the team. Eventually, we land somewhere, and usually that place is that our manager is toxic. Sometimes that is exactly right, but often we lose objectivity along the way because we are busy diagnosing a person while ignoring everything around them. What if the manager isn't where the problem started and is only passing it along?
I thought my manager had it out for me
Early in my teaching career, a manager took issue with the fact that I joked with my students in class, and the concern, as it was put to me, was that I was not being paid to joke around. It made very little sense to me at the time. I had been recognized for my teaching more than once by then, and humor was how I built rapport, held a room, and got the quieter students talking, so I took it personally, the way most people would. I challenged the conduct through the appropriate process, and the issue was dealt with. Honestly, it would have been easy to close the file right there and move on with a tidy conclusion about one bad manager.
Except I kept watching, and over the next few years, I saw colleagues under other managers describe versions of the same experience. Different identities, different departments, yet the same dynamic persisted, which was extremely odd. This forced me to go back and look at my own conclusion again. If the same behavior keeps turning up under different managers, then the manager may not be the only variable worth examining. The focus shifts from why my manager is doing this to what is happening inside this organization that has several managers behaving this way. That's a far harder question to sit with, but it's usually the more useful one.
What we actually mean by toxic
Toxic has become a very convenient word. A manager disagrees with us, toxic. We get feedback we did not want to hear, toxic. Someone holds us accountable, denies a vacation request, or brings in a rule we don't like, and we reach for the same word again, though none of that gets us there on its own. The research uses more careful language and offers terms worth borrowing, such as abusive supervision, workplace bullying, incivility, employee silence, and psychosocial safety climate. Abusive supervision, for instance, describes a sustained pattern of hostile supervisory conduct rather than one uncomfortable conversation or a legitimate performance management issue.[6] [2] A difficult manager is not automatically a toxic one, and a demanding workplace is not automatically a toxic workplace, so what we are really looking for is the pattern, although even a clear pattern will not tell us where it began.
The conflict the organization built
I have seen this one play out more times than I can count. Someone starts asking questions about a colleague. Why do you do that work? Why are you paid that? Why do you have responsibilities I do not have? A few months later, the manager is asking much the same thing, and now everything that employee does gets a second look. From where they sit, the story writes itself, the colleague complained, the manager took their side, and now it is two against one.
It is interesting when somebody actually looks at the org chart. They notice some strange patterns. People in nearly identical roles have different job descriptions, overlapping duties, and differing pay for comparable work. Reporting lines nobody in the building could draw for you if you handed them a pen, not because they don't make sense, but because they are so convoluted. The colleague may still have been out of line, and the manager may still have handled it badly, because micromanagement is micromanagement, whatever the cause. But the ambiguity came from somewhere, and it definitely did not come from the two people now fighting about it.
Follow the behavior upstream
The simplest way I know to tell managerial dysfunction apart from organizational dysfunction is to follow the behavior upstream and see where it comes from. Your manager changes priorities constantly, but are their priorities being changed constantly? They seem fixated on small details, but is somebody doing exactly that to them? They will not commit to a decision, so what tends to happen in that organization to a manager whose reasonable decision turns out badly? They never give you a straight answer, but are they getting straight answers from the people above them? People are careful about what they say in your area, but does that caution disappear on another team, or does everyone in the building already know which subjects not to raise?
None of that lets anybody off the hook. A dysfunctional organization may explain a manager's behavior, but it doesn't excuse it. Bad behavior is bad behavior. The human element remains, managers still control how they speak to people, how the work gets handed out, and how much of what lands on them gets pushed straight down onto somebody else. Pressure moves, and it almost always moves downward.
Simply put, it's like a chain of toxicity, a senior leader leans on a director, the director then leans on a manager, and lastly, that manager starts watching her staff more closely than she used to. People notice, they get careful, conversations get shorter, trust shrinks, and the work slips. Leadership sees the slip and, instead of addressing the culture, defaults to asking for more oversight. By the time all of this reaches the employee at the end of the chain, the only face attached to it is their immediate supervisor.
This is also where organizations stop receiving the information they need to fix any of it. Morrison and Milliken (2000) described organizational silence as a collective phenomenon in which employees hold back what they know about problems, and the psychological safety literature arrives at a similar point by asking whether speaking up feels personally risky.[1] Once people work out that raising something is pointless or costly, the organization stops hearing about its own problems and instead starts diagnosing individuals.
Sometimes the manager really is the problem
There is an opposite danger in all of this, and I want to name it plainly, because it is easy to become so interested in systems that you start explaining away conduct that should never have been explained away. A former colleague worked under a manager whose behavior grew steadily more antagonistic, lunch breaks turned into a point of contention, vacation became contentious, a sick day caused friction, and questions kept coming up about whether certain people were really the right fit for the team. It wasn't happening to just one person, since several people on that team described the same experience.
At first glance, that sounds like a bad manager, but then we see the context. The manager had been well regarded for years. So, what changed? People were moved onto his team without consulting him. The workload quadrupled, and the systems, the resources, the support, all of it remained unchanged. All of that matters, a lot more than you think. Still, none of it makes the behavior acceptable, because other managers at this organization carried the same load that year, lived the same experience, and did it all without counting lunch breaks, picking fights over approved leave, or treating their own people like suspects. The organization absolutely built the pressure, but the manager decided what to do with it. In most of these situations, the honest answer is both.
So what do you actually look at?
First, whether the behavior follows the manager. If you notice that it is just the one team churning out transfers, just the one team describing the same experience on the way out, and six months later the new hires are describing it right back to you, everything in that picture is changing except one person. Sustained hostile supervision tracks with lower job satisfaction, weaker commitment, more exhaustion, and a stronger intent to quit,[2] so a pattern like that is worth catching early rather than late.
Second, whether it follows the organization instead. If you notice that it is not one team at all, that it is different managers in different departments with different people telling you a version of the same thing, you are looking at something else. Nobody decides anything without cover. Complaints go into the process, and nothing comes back out. A new leader arrives with their own way of working, and within a year they sound like the person they replaced. That last one is the tell, because if the behavior outlives the people, then the people were never what was holding it up.
Third, what happens after somebody speaks up. Healthy organizations still have bad managers, still receive harassment complaints, and still have leaders who make mistakes, so conflict alone proves very little. However, what the organization does next proves a great deal. Are complaints looked at fairly, does anyone notice the pattern running across several of them, are people protected from retaliation, and does anything actually change, or does the person who raised the problem quietly become the problem?
Fourth, what the organization rewards, because every workplace has the values it publishes and the values it rewards. An organization can say it values collaboration while advancing leaders whose teams empty out every eighteen months, or say that people come first while rewarding its managers almost entirely on operational numbers, and employees read the second set long before they ever read the first. Culture is also what employees have to do in order to survive there and get ahead.
Fifth, whether incivility has quietly become ordinary, meaning dismissive comments, interruptions, public embarrassment, downward-aimed sarcasm, and talking about colleagues rather than to them. Incivility registers with people well beyond whoever it was aimed at, including those who only witness it.[4] [5] People have bad days, and one rude moment proves nothing, although when employees start telling you that this is just how things are here, that is worth sitting with for a while.
Lastly, whether psychological health counts for anything when it costs the organization something. If you notice that wellness programming is running fine while the environment underneath it quietly falls apart, then the employee assistance program isn't telling you much. What tells you something is the moment well-being runs into productivity and one of them has to give. Watch what gets decided when staffing is short. Watch what happens when somebody reports bullying, when the workload stops being reasonable, or when a manager who hits every number keeps generating complaints. Priorities stay invisible until they compete.
Explanation is not the same as an excuse
None of this sorts itself into clean categories, and I would be cautious of anyone who tells you otherwise. A manager can be struggling inside a broken organization and still behave badly, an organization can create unreasonable conditions and still employ managers who handle them decently, a good leader can come apart under years of pressure, and a genuinely abusive manager can last a very long time in a place that rewards results without ever asking how they were produced. That is why the easiest person to blame is usually the wrong place to stop. Replacing a manager will not repair a broken system, rewriting a policy will not change how leaders behave, and coaching rarely holds in a culture that keeps rewarding the very thing the coaching was meant to remove. However, blaming the culture should never become the reason a manager is allowed to mistreat employees.
We are good at seeing the person in front of us and much worse at seeing the organization, because that one lives in policies, incentives, workloads, reporting structures, and a pile of unwritten rules laid down years before most of us walked in. Sometimes your manager really is the problem. Sometimes your manager is the messenger. Sometimes they are both at once, caught in a dysfunctional system and feeding it along the way. Sometimes what looks like a personality problem turns out to be an organizational problem that found a human face.
Read more from Shahrukh Asif Khan
Shahrukh Asif Khan, Chief Vision and Culture Officer
Shahrukh Khan, DBA Candidate, MBA, QArb., is an academic leader, arbitration and mediation professional, and labour relations specialist focused on workplace dispute resolution and organizational governance. A Qualified Arbitrator and former Lead Negotiator and Vice President of Grievance, he brings deep expertise in collective bargaining, grievance arbitration, and labour-management relations. He is also an expert in policy auditing and development, ensuring legislative compliance and strengthening governance frameworks. His research centers on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), talent management, and labour relations, examining how inclusive policy and leadership strategy drive sustainable organizational performance.
References:
[1] Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
[2] Mackey, J. D., Frieder, R. E., Brees, J. R., & Martinko, M. J. (2017). Abusive supervision: A meta-analysis and empirical review. Journal of Management, 43(6), 1940–1965.
[3] Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706–725.
[4] Pearson, C. M., Andersson, L. M., & Porath, C. L. (2000). Assessing and attacking workplace incivility. Organizational Dynamics, 29(2), 123–137.
[5] Reich, T. C., & Hershcovis, M. S. (2015). Observing workplace incivility. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(1), 203–215.
[6] Tepper, B. J., Simon, L., & Park, H. M. (2017). Abusive supervision. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 123–152.
