Adam Grant to Job Seekers and Business Leaders: Beware the 4Rs of Toxic Work Culture

Tolstoy's classic novel famously begins: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Many people think you could say something similar for disgruntled companies.

It's true that every toxic workplace has its own unique fingerprint of unpleasant personalities, questionable ethics, and inane regulations. No two narcissistic bosses or rule-obsessed HR departments are exactly the same in their horror. But according to some of the smartest business commentators, beneath this superficial diversity lies a surprising amount of similarity.

Not every toxic corporate culture is toxic in its own way. According to them, every type of terrible corporate culture can be traced to a handful of fundamental mistakes.

A "toxic" culture isn't just a culture you don't like.

Part of the confusion around what exactly makes a culture toxic, according to VC and blogger Hunter Walk, is that many of us use the term "toxic" loosely to simply mean a culture we personally don't like.

"Coinbase, which has been quite aggressive in defining what is expected of you, is not my cup of tea, but I can still appreciate the clarity they provide to potential employees. Likewise , the 'holacracy' style that some startups have been exploring sounds like a nightmare. But that sheer personal attraction or repulsion doesn't make them good or bad," he recently wrote on his blog.

I personally would rather chop off a few toes than work in the kind of place that has people wearing suits and sitting in cubicles for 12 hours a day, but that does not represent all of the bank's toxic investment. It just means I'm not cut out for Goldman Sachs (no news there).

So if a toxic culture isn't something idiosyncratic and individual that you can determine by your intuition, how do you define when a company has a truly harmful or ineffective culture?

Adam Grant's Four Deadly Sins of Toxic Workplace Culture

On his WorkLife podcast recently, Professor Wharton offered a simple framework to answer this question. He explained that a toxic corporate culture is always a lack of balance. Businesses become toxic when they go too far in one direction on two competing scales of values: relationships versus results and rules versus risk.

If you overemphasize any of these four Rs, he claims, you will commit one of the four deadly sins of corporate culture:

Relations. If not stepping on toes or upsetting people is all that matters in a business, it's no surprise that getting things done is low on the list of priorities. The result is mediocrity and a culture without accountability. “Even if you do a terrible job, you can still move forward as long as people like you,” Grant says of this first basic type of toxicity.

Results. This is the other end of the trade-off between relationships and results. On this side are companies that value relationships so little that they throw human decency under the bus in the name of performance. Grant (and research) suggests that this variety of toxicity is the deadliest of all corporate culture sins and can lead to disrespect, abuse,...