Is Your Manager Toxic, or Is It Your Workplace?
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.
Sometimes the manager is the problem. Sometimes the manager is the messenger. Telling the two apart decides whether anything actually changes. Early in my teaching career, a manager took issue with the fact that I joked with my students in class. As I understood it, the criticism was that I wasn't being paid to joke around.
It made very little sense to me at the time. By then, I had received several recognitions for my teaching, and humor was part of how I built rapport, held attention, and made the room safe enough for quieter students to speak.
So I took it personally. I assumed the problem was that this manager had an issue with me.
I challenged the conduct through the appropriate process, and it was addressed. It would have been easy to close the file there. Bad manager, problem solved.
But I kept watching.
Over the next few years, I saw colleagues under different managers describe versions of the same thing. Different people, different areas, similar dynamic.
That forced me to revisit my own diagnosis, although it was not a comfortable thing to revisit.
If the same behavior keeps surfacing under different managers, the manager may not be the only variable worth examining. The question shifts from why my manager is doing this to what is happening inside this organization that has several managers behaving this way.
That is a very different investigation, and it usually leads somewhere more useful.
What we actually mean by toxic
Toxic has become a convenient workplace label. A manager disagrees with us. We receive feedback we did not want. Someone holds us accountable, denies a vacation request, or introduces a rule we dislike. None of that, on its own, establishes toxicity.
The research offers sharper language, abusive supervision, workplace bullying, incivility, employee silence, and psychosocial safety climate.
Abusive supervision, for example, concerns sustained perceptions of hostile supervisory conduct rather than a single difficult conversation or legitimate performance management.[6] [2]
A difficult manager is not necessarily a toxic manager, and a demanding workplace is not necessarily a toxic workplace. The signal is usually the pattern.
But even a clear pattern does not tell you where it started.
The conflict the organization built
Consider a situation I have seen versions of many times.
A staff member starts questioning a colleague’s role, why they do that work, why they are paid what they are paid, and why they hold responsibilities others do not.
Sometime later, the manager begins asking similar questions. Scrutiny increases. Micromanagement follows.
From the employee’s side, the explanation looks obvious. The colleague complained, the manager agreed, and now the two of them are aligned against them.
Then someone looks at the structure.
The organization has hired people into similar positions under different job descriptions. Responsibilities overlap. Compensation differs. Reporting lines are unclear. People doing comparable work entered under completely different arrangements.
The colleague may still have behaved inappropriately, and the manager may still have handled it poorly. Micromanagement is micromanagement.
But underneath it all sits an organization that created ambiguity and then left the people inside it to negotiate the consequences among themselves.
Following the behavior upstream
One of the simplest ways to separate managerial dysfunction from organizational dysfunction is to follow the behavior upstream. If a manager changes priorities constantly, it is worth knowing whether their own priorities are being changed constantly. If they seem fixated on small details, it is worth knowing whether they are being scrutinized the same way. If they will not commit to a decision, it is worth knowing whether the organization punishes managers whose reasonable decisions produce imperfect outcomes. If employees are careful about what they say, it is worth knowing whether that caution disappears on another team or whether everyone in the building already knows which subjects are not discussed.
None of this absolves anyone. Organizational dysfunction can explain a manager’s behavior without excusing it, and managers still choose how they communicate, how they distribute work, and whether they pass along the pressure that lands on them.
Behavior travels further than organizations tend to assume. A senior leader leans on directors, directors lean on managers, managers increase oversight of employees, communication deteriorates, trust declines, performance drops, and leadership responds with more oversight. By the time an employee feels it, their immediate supervisor is the most visible face of the problem.
Research on employee silence explains why these patterns become durable. Morrison and Milliken (2000) described organizational silence as a collective phenomenon in which employees withhold what they know about problems, and psychological safety research points to the same underlying question of whether speaking up feels personally risky.[1] When people decide that raising something is futile or costly, the organization loses the information it needs to diagnose itself.
Sometimes the manager really is the problem
An opposite danger is becoming so interested in organizational explanations that genuinely harmful conduct gets rationalized away.
A former colleague worked under a manager whose behavior had become steadily more antagonistic. Lunch periods became a point of contention. Vacation became contentious. A sick day created friction. Questions arose about whether certain people were the right fit for the team.
Looking more closely, it was not limited to one person, several people on that team described the same thing. At first glance, it was a straightforward case of a bad manager.
Then came the context. The manager had previously been well regarded. Employees had been moved onto the team without the manager having much say. Workload had increased sharply, and resources hadn't kept pace.
That context matters, but this is where organizational analysis gets uncomfortable. Understanding why someone behaves badly does not make the behavior acceptable. Other managers in that same environment carried the same workload without policing lunch breaks, manufacturing conflict over legitimate leave, or treating their staff as suspects.
The organization created the pressure, the manager still chose how it reached people.
So the honest answer is often neither the manager nor the organization. It is both.
The signals worth reading
Does the behavior follow the manager? Turnover is high on one team and not on others. People transfer out. Former employees describe similar experiences, and new employees eventually describe them too. The constant variable is the manager, and sustained hostile supervision has been linked to a wide range of negative employee outcomes.[2]
Does it follow the organization? Different managers, different departments, different employees, same experience. Managers across the organization avoid independent decisions. Complaints disappear into processes that produce nothing visible. New leaders arrive with different styles and gradually start behaving like their predecessors. The clearest evidence of a cultural problem is not the values statement, it is behavioral replication.
What happens after someone speaks up? Healthy organizations still have bad managers, still receive harassment complaints, and still have leaders who make mistakes. Conflict on its own proves very little. What the organization does next proves a great deal, whether it examines complaints fairly, notices patterns across complaints, protects people from retaliation, and changes when it should. Or whether the person who named the problem becomes the problem.
What does the organization reward? Every workplace has two sets of values, the ones it publishes and the ones it rewards. An organization can say it values collaboration while advancing leaders whose teams empty out every eighteen months, or say people come first while rewarding managers almost entirely on operational numbers. Culture is also what employees learn they must do to survive and get ahead.
Has incivility become ordinary? Dismissive comments, interruptions, public embarrassment, sarcasm aimed downward, talking about colleagues rather than to them. Incivility registers with people well beyond the person it was aimed at, including those who only witness it.[4] [5] The question is not whether someone was rude once, because people have bad days. It is whether disrespect has quietly become an accepted way of dealing with each other. When employees start saying that this is just how things are here, that is worth noticing.
Does psychological health matter when it competes? An organization can run wellness programming and still have a poor psychosocial environment. The test is not whether an employee assistance program exists. It is what happens when well-being runs up against productivity, when staffing is inadequate, when someone reports bullying, when workloads become unreasonable, or when a high-performing manager keeps generating complaints. Priorities only become clear when they compete.
The diagnosis decides the intervention
Workplace dysfunction rarely sorts itself into clean categories. A manager can be struggling inside a broken organization and still behave badly. An organization can create unreasonable conditions while employing managers who handle them decently. A good leader can deteriorate under years of pressure. A genuinely abusive manager can last a long time in a place that rewards results without asking how they were produced.
This 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 leadership behavior. Coaching rarely holds in a culture that keeps rewarding the very thing the coaching was meant to remove. Blaming culture should never become the reason a manager is allowed to mistreat people.
We are good at seeing the person standing in front of us. Organizations are harder to see because they live in policies, incentives, workloads, reporting structures, and unwritten rules built up over years.
Sometimes your manager really is the problem. Sometimes your manager is the messenger. Sometimes they are both a participant in a dysfunctional system and a product of it. Sometimes what looks like a personality problem is an organizational problem that has simply 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.
