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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
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      Toxic Workers
      09 Nov 2015Working Paper Summaries

      Toxic Workers

      by Dylan Minor
      This paper identifies personality and situational factors that lead to a worker engaging in toxic behavior, including sexual harassment, workplace violence, and fraud.
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      Author Abstract

      While there has been a lot of research on finding and developing top performers in the workplace, less attention has been paid to the question of how to manage those workers who are harmful to organizational performance. In extreme cases, in addition to hurting performance, such workers can generate enormous regulatory and legal liabilities for the firm. We explore a large novel dataset of over 50,000 workers across 11 different firms to document a variety of aspects of workers’ characteristics and circumstances that lead them to engage in "toxic" behavior. We also find that avoiding a toxic worker (or converting him to an average worker) enhances performance to a much greater extent than replacing an average worker with a superstar worker.

      Paper Information

      • Full Working Paper Text
      • Working Paper Publication Date: October 2015
      • HBS Working Paper Number: 16-057
      • Faculty Unit(s): Strategy
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