Toxic organizational cultures and leadership have led to major reputational failures, with the greatest impact felt by the people who dedicate their careers to working for these organizations. And yet organizations do not become toxic overnight. They do not consciously set out to break rules and regulations, nor do they actively seek wrongdoing. This book defines toxic culture, explains how toxic cultures emerge over time, and provides practical approaches supported by in-depth research for overcoming a toxic culture at the individual, team, and organizational level. Pragmatic and applicable, the book provides a call to action that can be applied in any type of organization. While the role of leadership in toxic cultures is acknowledged, the book sets out four distinct stages to embedding toxic cultures and draws on examples from leading organizations and companies to illustrate each stage. The book then identifies interventions and levers that can be implemented by executives, boards, and HR practitioners to prevent toxicity and to change toxic cultures back to healthy, positive workplaces. Drawing on research and interviews with senior HR leaders and executives, the book provides: An understanding of the four stages of toxic cultures and the impact of performance pressures in driving toxicity An appreciation of the role of senior leadership and personality traits Practical tools and guidance on interventions for practitioners to build and sustain a healthy and positive workplace Senior executives, HR, and organizational development practitioners in local and global organizations spanning a range of industry sectors will find this book invaluable. The book is also highly relevant to consultants working in the field of corporate culture and change.

“The day this person left our company is considered an annual holiday!” THIS QUOTE, taken from Kusy and Holloway’s research on toxic personalities, echoes the frustration and confusion that come from working with or managing an extremely difficult person. Just one toxic person has the capacity to debilitate individuals, teams, and even organizations. Toxic Workplace! is the first book to tackle the underlying systems issues that enable a toxic person to create a path of destruction in an organization, pervading others’ thoughts and energies, even undermining their very sense of well-being. Based on all-new research with over 400 leaders, many from the Fortune 500 list, this book illustrates how to manage existing toxic behaviors, create norms that prevent the growth or regrowth of toxic environments, and ultimately design organizational communities of respectful engagement. Kusy and Holloway’s research reveals the warning signs that indicate a serious behavioral problem and identifies how this toxicity spreads in systems with long-term effects on organizational climate, even after the person has left. Their two-year, cutting-edge research study provides very specific actions that leaders need to take to reduce both the intensity and frequency of toxic personalities at work. No other book provides this menu of options from a systems perspective with practical relevance in real work situations. You’ll learn how to identify the toxic personality and describe the leader reactions and approaches that typically don’t work. Toxic Workplace! provides hands-on approaches that work with research-based strategies at the individual, team, and organizational level.Toxic Workplace! will provide new insights on how leaders lead, how organizational cultures sustain themselves, and how teams deal with toxic personalities.

In the Handbook of Workplace Violence, editors E. Kevin Kelloway, Julian Barling, and Joseph J. Hurrell Jr. bring together the contributions of leading researchers to provide summaries and unique perspectives on current theory, research, and practice relating to workplace violence. This is the most up-to-date resource available providing a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge regarding all aspects of workplace violence and aggression. Part I summarizes the leading theoretical perspectives on violence and aggression and provides prevalence estimates for aggression and violence in North American workplaces. Part II focuses on leading experts in the field summarizing what is known about the sources of workplace violence (e.g., partner violence, communal violence, industrial relations violence, public-initiated violence) forms of aggression in the workplace (e.g., emotional abuse, workplace bullying, cyber-aggression) and populations (e.g., occupations, youth) at special risk for workplace violence and aggression. Part III considers the experience of victims as well as individual (e.g., critical incident stress debriefing) and organizational (e.g., selection, training) interventions designed to prevent, or ameliorate the consequences of workplace violence. This is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the fields of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Human Resources, Health Psychology, Public Health, and Employee Assistance Programs. It is also an excellent textbook for graduate courses in Organizational Behavior, Occupational Health Psychology, and Organizational Psychology.

The blockbuster best seller Primal Leadership introduced us to "resonant" leaders--individuals who manage their own and others' emotions in ways that drive success. Leaders everywhere recognized the validity of resonant leadership, but struggled with how to achieve and sustain resonance amid the relentless demands of work and life. Now, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee provide an indispensable guide to overcoming the vicious cycle of stress, sacrifice, and dissonance that afflicts many leaders. Drawing from extensive multidisciplinary research and real-life stories, Resonant Leadership offers a field-tested framework for creating the resonance that fuels great leadership. Rather than constantly sacrificing themselves to workplace demands, leaders can manage the cycle using specific techniques to combat stress, avoid burnout, and renew themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally. The book reveals that the path to resonance is through mindfulness, hope, and compassion and shows how intentionally employing these qualities creates effective and enduring leadership. Great leaders are resonant leaders. Resonant Leadership offers the inspiration--and tools--to spark and sustain resonance in ourselves and in those we lead.

In recent years, scholars have focused more on the "dark sides of leadership." Both the negative and positive aspects of the relationship between leaders and followers are considered. But the relationship between leaders and followers is also influenced by the context in which the relationship occurs. Organizational aspects such as culture and structures are studied in relation to how negative leadership develops. Organizations, just like humans, are able to develop justifications for their actions, to self-aggrandize by claiming their exclusivity. In this book, the dark sides of organizational behaviors and leadership are considered from different aspects and contexts. The book contributes knowledge of how negative leadership develops, what part organizational structures play, and what the consequences are for the leader, the subordinates and the organization.

"These are the questions at the heart of the stories in The Wounded Leader. In these stories leaders struggle to make sense of their wounding experiences. We meet a principal who felt undermined by a contentious staff, another whose early mistakes ignited rumors and discontent, a leader who felt shunned when she took a position at a failing school, and a superintendent at odds with the school board."--Jacket.

Beholden to accepted assumptions about people and organizations, too many enterprises waste human potential. Robert Quinn shows how to defy convention and create organizations where people feel fully engaged and continually rewarded, where both individually and collectively they flourish and exceed expectations. The problem is that leaders are following a negative and constraining “mental map” that insists organizations must be rigid, top-down hierarchies and that the people in them are driven mainly by self-interest and fear. But leaders can adopt a different mental map, one where organizations are networks of fluid, evolving relationships and where people are motivated by a desire to grow, learn, and serve a larger goal. Using dozens of memorable stories, Quinn describes specific actions leaders can take to facilitate the emergence of this organizational culture—helping people gain a sense of purpose, engage in authentic conversations, see new possibilities, and sacrifice for the common good. The book includes the Positive Organization Generator, a tool that provides 100 real-life practices from positive organizations and helps you reinvent them to fit your specific needs. With the POG you can identify and implement the practices that will have the greatest impact on your organization. At its heart, the book helps leaders to see new possibilities that lie within the acknowledged realities of organizational life. It provides five keys for learning to be "bilingual"--speaking the conventional language of business as well as the language of the positive organization. When leaders can do this, they are able to make real and lasting change.