Ethical Issue: Toxic Workplace Culture

The work environment is a social setting with people with different behaviours, personalities and beliefs. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that one respects their work environment by acting in the best way possible. Nonetheless, some people fail to be considerate of others and end up making the work environment uncomfortable. Some people do so knowingly, while others tend to be clueless that their self-conduct negatively affects their colleagues. Therefore, it is imperative to understand toxic work cultures to avoid them and improve the overall ambience at work. Toxic work behaviour refers to harmful work surrounding that are often characterized by attitudes and behaviours that adversely affect the welfare of employees (Orgad, 2019).

Types of Toxic Workplace Behavior

Toxic work behaviour refers to the self-conduct that contributes to toxic workplace culture. The prevalent types of toxic work behaviour include;

1. Bullying and harassment: these are actions that are aimed at hurting colleagues emotionally or physically.
2. Discrimination: refers to treating a colleague or employee unfairly. The prevalent reasons people discriminate against each other are differences in race, religion, gender, disability, ethnicity, nationality, and culture, among others.
3. Lack of communication or support: this refers to where employees tend to ignore each other at work, creating an environment with limited self-expression.

Effects of Toxic Workplace Culture

1. Poor work execution.
2. High employee turnover.
3. Low employee motivation.

Ways to Reverse Toxic Workplace Culture

1. Conduct training sessions to inform employees how to interact appropriately.
2. Encourage team building exercises to increase team cohesion.
3. Inspire team sharing.
4. Recognize and award the most dedicated employees with the best work behaviour (Half, 2022).
5. Implement forms of reprimand for employees that display toxic behavioural tendencies.

References

Half, R. (2022). How to avoid toxic workplaces—6 tips | Robert Half®. Web.

Orgad, S. (2019). Choice and Confidence Culture/Toxic Work Culture. In Heading Home (pp. 27–48). Columbia University Press.