Most organisations do not fall apart through dramatic failures. They erode quietly, through small daily interactions that chip away at trust, performance, and the willingness of good people to stay.
The colleague who interrupts every idea you raise, then presents the same idea as their own an hour later. The manager who praises you in private and undermines you in public. The team that has learned to stay silent in meetings because dissent is unwelcome and information is weaponised. The culture where gossip fills the gaps left by poor communication, and microaggressions accumulate until people stop bringing their full selves to work.
None of these behaviours make the front page. Most of them would never feature in a formal grievance. But their cumulative impact on how organisations function, how people feel, and what they are willing to give is enormous. And unlike one-off incidents, patterns of negative behaviour tend to compound rather than resolve on their own.
This post maps the most common forms of negative behaviour at work, what the research says about their impact, and what organisations and individuals can actually do to interrupt the cycle.
Before getting into the specific behaviours, it is worth establishing the scale of what we are dealing with, because the data is more significant than most leadership teams acknowledge.
Georgetown University professor Christine Porath, who has spent two decades researching workplace incivility, found in her surveys that nearly half of employees in 1998 reported being treated rudely at least once a month. By 2011, that figure had risen to 55%. By 2016, it was 62%. The direction of travel is consistent, and it is not improving.
In a poll of 800 managers and employees across 17 industries, Porath and her colleague Christine Pearson found that the consequences were direct and measurable. Of those who experienced incivility at work:
That is the impact of incivility alone, before factoring in bullying, gossip, exclusion, microaggressions, or the sustained psychological pressure of working in a culture where mistreatment is normalised. Each of those compounds the effect.
The APA’s 2023 Work in America Survey, conducted among 2,515 US employees, found that 22% experienced harassment at work in the previous 12 months, up from 14% in 2022. The iHire 2025 Toxic Workplace Trends Report found that 74.9% of employees have worked for an employer with a toxic workplace at some point in their career.
These are not edge cases. They are describing the ordinary experience of work for a substantial majority of the workforce.
Before examining specific categories, it helps to be precise. Not every difficult experience at work is negative behaviour in the sense that matters here. A hard conversation, a critical piece of feedback, a demanding deadline, a disagreement about strategy, none of these are inherently negative. They are normal features of functional workplaces.
What distinguishes negative behaviour is that it undermines the dignity, safety, or fair treatment of another person. It includes actions that are intentionally harmful and actions that are unintentional but harmful nonetheless. It includes patterns, not just isolated incidents. And it includes behaviour that goes unaddressed by the organisation just as much as the behaviour itself, because tolerance of negative behaviour is itself a signal to everyone watching about what kind of culture this is.
The main categories that research identifies are incivility and disrespect, bullying and intimidation, gossip and rumour-spreading, microaggressions, exclusion and ostracism, credit theft and undermining, and abusive leadership. These often overlap and reinforce each other, but understanding them separately helps organisations and individuals recognise what they are actually dealing with.
Incivility is defined by researchers as low-intensity deviant behaviour that violates workplace norms of mutual respect. It does not require shouting or obvious aggression. It includes:
The power of incivility, and the reason it is so damaging, is that it is ambiguous. The target often cannot be certain whether the behaviour was intentional. That ambiguity is psychologically costly to resolve. Porath’s research found that 63% of employees who experienced incivility lost work time actively trying to avoid the offender, and 80% spent significant work time ruminating about what happened.
The research also shows a contagion effect. Incivility spreads. People who experience rude treatment are more likely to treat others rudely in turn. Managers who are treated discourteously by senior leaders tend to pass that treatment down to their own teams. An organisation that allows incivility at the top will find it spreading through every layer of the culture, accelerating until it becomes the norm rather than the exception.
The Diverseek article on workplace civility as an underrated DEI strategy connects this pattern to inclusion outcomes and explains why civility is not soft or peripheral but foundational to everything else an organisation tries to build.
Bullying is the sustained, targeted, and often systematic version of incivility. Where incivility might be ambient and diffuse, bullying is directed at specific individuals and tends to be repetitive. It includes public humiliation, persistent criticism, threats, exclusion, sabotage of work, shouting, and demeaning behaviour in front of others.
What makes it particularly destructive is its asymmetry. Bullying most often flows from positions of greater power to positions of lesser power, from managers to direct reports, from senior peers to junior ones. That asymmetry means the target has limited recourse and significant incentive to stay silent, because the person with the power to bully is often also the person with power over their career.
Harvard Business School research found that a single toxic employee in a critical position can cost an organisation approximately $12,000 per year in direct productivity losses, compared to roughly $5,000 gained from a top performer. Avoiding a toxic hire is worth more than hiring a superstar.
The APA’s 2023 survey found that 22% of US workers experienced harassment at work in the previous year. The iHire 2025 report found that 78.7% of employees who had experienced a toxic workplace attributed it specifically to poor leadership or management, with 71.9% citing lack of leadership accountability as the primary mechanism.
The Diverseek piece on the hidden cost of workplace bullying covers the individual and organisational impact in detail, including what options exist for both employees experiencing it and managers trying to address it in their teams.
Every organisation has an informal communication network that operates alongside official channels. In healthy organisations, this network carries useful information, shared context, and social bonding. In organisations where formal communication is poor or trust is low, the informal network fills with rumour, speculation, and negative gossip that can be more damaging than almost any single formal incident.
Research published in BMC Psychology found that negative workplace gossip reduces employees’ proactive work behaviour, with anxiety mediating the relationship. Employees in environments of sustained negative gossip become more defensive and self-protective, and less likely to take initiative, collaborate openly, or advocate for shared goals. That shift in orientation, from contribution to self-protection, is one of the most damaging things that can happen to team performance.
The crucial distinction, drawn clearly in the research, is between positive and negative gossip. Informal communication that shares useful context, reinforces shared values, or builds connection is a normal and often beneficial feature of organisational life. What is harmful is gossip that targets individuals’ reputations, spreads unverified accusations, creates in-groups and out-groups, or fills the space that should be occupied by honest direct communication from leadership.
Research from the MIT Sloan Management Review identified disrespect and non-inclusion as core predictors of the toxic culture that drives attrition. Negative gossip is both a symptom of those conditions and a mechanism that deepens them. It is also highly sensitive to leadership communication. When leaders communicate clearly, regularly, and honestly, the information vacuum that gossip fills does not exist. When they do not, rumour floods in.
The Diverseek article on how to navigate sensitive topics at work covers the communication norms that prevent the kind of information gaps that fuel destructive gossip cycles.
Microaggressions are subtle, often unintentional statements or behaviours that communicate bias against people from marginalised groups. They are called “micro” because each individual instance appears minor. The cumulative effect is not minor at all.
That combination, high prevalence of microaggressions and near-zero reporting, is how organisations end up believing their culture is healthier than it is. The behaviour is happening constantly. It is simply invisible to the people most insulated from it.
Research published in Current Psychology in 2025 found that microaggressions, even when unintentional, function as affective micro-events that generate ongoing emotional responses, leading to reduced work engagement, higher emotional exhaustion, and greater burnout over time. The damage compounds with repetition, not just in terms of the emotional toll but in the gradual reduction of what targets are willing to contribute.
Becker.com’s analysis of the research notes that unchecked microaggressions lead to lower morale, productivity, problem-solving capacity, and job satisfaction, and that over time, they contribute directly to the loss of career opportunities for marginalised colleagues.
The Diverseek piece on microaffirmations as a practical counterweight covers what small, consistent positive actions can do to shift the culture in the opposite direction. The piece on sensitivity training in the workplace addresses the practical development work that reduces unintentional microaggressive behaviour.
Not all negative behaviour involves doing something harmful. Some of the most damaging patterns involve deliberate omission, leaving certain people out of meetings where decisions are made, failing to introduce them to influential colleagues, sharing information with some team members but not others, and declining to advocate for people whose contributions are visible but whose advancement is quietly blocked.
Research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that ostracism at work is actually experienced as more psychologically damaging than harassment in many cases, because harassment at least confirms that you exist and register as a threat. Being ignored, in the deep sense of being treated as invisible or irrelevant, threatens fundamental needs for belonging and significance in ways that direct aggression does not.
MIT Sloan’s research identifying the dark triad of toxic culture places non-inclusion as one of three core predictors of attrition, alongside disrespect and unethical conduct. The practical form that non-inclusion takes in most organisations is not obvious discrimination. It is the quiet allocation of stretch projects, sponsorship relationships, and informal access to influence that shapes whose careers advance and whose do not.
The McKinsey and LeanIn.Org Women in the Workplace research consistently shows that Black women are more likely than any other group to be the only person of their background in their professional environment, to face exclusion from informal networks, and to have managers who do not advocate for their advancement. These patterns are not incidental. They are the structural form that exclusion takes in organisations that have not examined how informal power operates.
The Diverseek article on first-generation professionals at work examines one specific dimension of this, looking at how background and cultural capital shape who gets access to the informal knowledge and relationships that accelerate careers, and who is left to navigate that terrain alone.
The research is remarkably consistent on this point. iHire’s 2025 survey found that 78.7% of employees who experienced toxic workplaces attributed it to poor leadership. SHRM’s landmark culture report found that 76% of American workers say their manager sets the culture. The MIT Sloan research on attrition predictors identified leadership as the primary mechanism through which cultural toxicity operates.
Abusive leadership takes multiple forms. The obvious version, shouting, demeaning employees in public, threatening people’s jobs, is well understood if not always well addressed. The less obvious version is more common and more insidious: the leader who takes credit for others’ work, who communicates preferentially with some team members and excludes others, who responds to challenge or difference of opinion with subtle punishment, and who creates an environment where loyalty to them personally is treated as more important than performance or integrity.
Porath’s McKinsey research found that de-energising relationships have four to seven times the negative impact on performance as energising relationships have positive impact. That asymmetry means one abusive leader in a senior position does damage that takes many positive leaders to offset.
What distinguishes organisations that address this from those that do not is accountability. Where leaders face genuine consequences for their behaviour, the culture adjusts. Where leadership performance reviews omit behavioural criteria entirely or treat them as secondary to output metrics, abusive behaviour is implicitly tolerated, and the signal that sends is received throughout the organisation.
The Diverseek piece on how bias silently shapes boardroom decisions examines the specific ways that leadership behaviour shapes culture in ways leaders rarely intend but consistently produce.
These behaviours do not affect everyone equally, and that is not accidental. Negative behaviour in the workplace concentrates on people who are already marginalised, people from minority ethnic backgrounds, women, LGBTQ+ employees, people with disabilities, and first-generation professionals. It concentrates there because those individuals have less informal power to resist it, less institutional protection when they raise it, and less visible support when they challenge it.
This means that addressing negative behaviour at work is inseparable from DEI work. The two are not parallel initiatives. They are dimensions of the same problem. An organisation that invests in diversity hiring while tolerating the negative behaviour patterns that make minority employees feel excluded, undermined, and unsafe will simply churn through diverse hires without ever building a diverse organisation.
The Diverseek piece on code-switching at work captures one specific aspect of this, examining the invisible cognitive and emotional labour that employees from minority backgrounds perform daily when they are working in environments where their authentic expression is treated as a negative.
The interventions that change these patterns are structural, not attitudinal. Awareness training has a role, but it is a small and bounded role. Telling people that incivility is harmful does not change the systems, incentives, and norms that produce incivility.
If you are currently experiencing negative behaviour at work, several things are worth knowing.
First, the research validates what you are experiencing. Porath and Pearson’s research across 14,000 people is unambiguous: incivility, bullying, gossip, microaggressions, and exclusion all have documented, measurable impacts on performance, health, and wellbeing. The difficulty you feel concentrating, the energy spent ruminating, the reluctance to contribute fully, these are normal responses to abnormal conditions. They are not signs of inadequacy.
Second, document what you experience. Dates, what was said or done, who was present, any written records. This is protective whether you choose to report formally, raise the issue informally with HR, or ultimately decide to leave.
Third, as the APA’s research shows, 58% of employees in negative environments plan to leave within a year. Leaving is a legitimate and often rational response, particularly where the pattern of behaviour is established, leadership is the source of it, and the organisation has shown no willingness to address it. You are not obliged to remain in an environment that is damaging your health.
The Diverseek piece on what happens when employees are afraid to speak up covers what silence costs both the individual and the organisation, and what it takes to create conditions where raising concerns is genuinely safe.
Negative behaviour at work is not a background condition that organisations simply have to manage. It is an active cost that compounds over time, visible in turnover rates, productivity losses, legal exposure, and the slow departure of the best people to organisations where they are treated with more basic dignity.
These are the ordinary numbers. This is not what things look like in outlier organisations. This is the baseline.
Organisations that choose to address negative behaviour, not through one-off training but through structural accountability, clear communication, genuine recourse, and leadership that models the behaviour it expects, produce different numbers. They show lower attrition, higher engagement, better innovation, and more inclusive cultures. The connection to DEI is direct and unavoidable. Negative behaviour is where diversity efforts fail in practice.
The Diverseek podcast aims to create a platform for meaningful conversations, education, and advocacy surrounding issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in various aspects of society.