Toxic Work Environments: What Helps and What Hurts

Abstract

Toxic or harmful working conditions are an important problem for workers and organizations. Fully understanding the consequences of such conditions has been difficult because in-depth information across organizational contexts is scarce. The current article makes use of a new data set based on content coding the full population of organizational ethnographies ( N = 212) to secure in-depth evaluations across a wide range of organizational contexts. The analysis confirms the role of lack of autonomy and lack of skills as toxic working conditions but suggests an equally important role for organizational chaos. Importantly, returning to the narrative accounts allows exploration of the buffering and exacerbating roles of coworker relations and employee involvement and the mechanisms through which these work to moderate other conditions.