How to spot the red flags of a toxic culture

6 key warning signs to watch out for

[Source Images: Pixabay]

BY Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Andrés Hatum

No matter how talented and ambitious you are, your ability to do well in your job and career, and especially enjoy your professional life, largely depends on where you work—in particular, the workplace culture. Defined broadly as the formal and informal rules that determine “how we do things around here,” workplace culture is a sort of human algorithm that governs the social dynamics in organizations, much like national culture does so for countries.

Although there is no such thing as a universally good culture, and there are many different ways of creating positive working environments under which people thrive, there are rather consistent patterns when it comes to the opposite: places where people feel unhappy, disengaged, or unfairly treated, and where politics corrode meritocracy while nepotism eclipses any attempt to reward people on the basis of talent, effort, or actual value. In these toxic cultures, a few individuals may........

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