The Washington Post has a story online about a study of “toxic” people in the workplace titled; “Beware the rule-following co-worker, Harvard study warns.”
The Researchers were looking to create a profile of the kind of workers that caused problems; “researchers Michael Housman and Dylan Minor crunched data from 50,000 employees at 11 companies to come up with what may be the world’s most detailed personality profile of a “toxic worker.””
A key finding was that the most toxic employees weren’t lazy, but were often hyper-productive which may have been one reason why their toxicity was overlooked.
First, a toxic worker isn’t necessarily a lazy worker. In fact, they tend to be insanely productive, much more so than the average worker.
Housman, a workplace scientist at an analytics firm, and Minor, a visiting assistant professor at Harvard, explain that this may explain why these workers tend to persist in an organization despite their questionable ethics and morals: “There is a potential trade-off. … They are corrupt, but they excel in work performance.”
Other findings included that such people were selfish, and overconfident. The most interesting takeaway though was that the toxic people were more likely to claim to be steadfast followers of the rules.
Even though it seems counterintuitive, Housman and Minor said that those employees who claimed in the questionnaire that rules should always be followed with no exceptions (as opposed to those who said sometimes you have to break rules to do a good job) were the most likely to be terminated for breaking the rules.
“It could also be the case that those who claim the rules should be followed are more Machiavellian in nature, purporting to embrace whatever rules, characteristics or beliefs that they believe are most likely to obtain them a job,” they theorized. “There is strong evidence that Machiavellianism leads to deviant behavior.”
Though this study dealt with the workplace, I couldn’t help but see parallels with toxic people in churches. In many cases, it seems that the people who cause the most conflict and strife within the church tend to be tendentious rule followers, and are often at the center of church activities, taking on more responsibilities than a single person should (and not always with good results).
What do you think? Have you seen similar things, and how can the church deal effectively with “toxic” people whose efforts, however they imagine them, ultimately cause more pain and strife?