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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 03 2015, @06:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the people-who-should-be-fired dept.

They bad-mouth you to work colleagues behind your back; they angrily demand the impossible from everyone but themselves; they make unwanted comments about your attire.

At some point in our careers, most of us have come across someone known as a "toxic worker," a colleague or boss whose abrasive style or devious actions can make the workday utterly miserable. Such people hurt morale, stoke conflict in the office, and harm a company's reputation.

But toxic workers aren't just annoying or unpleasant to be around; they cost firms significantly more money than most of them even realize. According to a new Harvard Business School (HBS) paper, toxic workers are so damaging to the bottom line that avoiding them or rooting them out delivers twice the value to a company that hiring a superstar performer does.

While a top 1 percent worker might return $5,303 in cost savings to a company through increased output, avoiding a toxic hire will net an estimated $12,489, the study said. That figure does not include savings from sidestepping litigation, regulatory penalties, or decreased productivity as a result of low morale.

On the other hand, toxic co-workers are useful as foils come bonus time: "Hey, at least I'm not as bad as that guy..."


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday December 03 2015, @09:38PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday December 03 2015, @09:38PM (#271569) Journal

    That's one of the primary attributes of people like that. Some work, done fairly recently and receiving a fair bit of attention, showed that the least competent people are also the most clueless about their lack, tend to believe the opposite, actually.

    There are a lot of different ways to go wrong. Perhaps a common trait of all is an unwillingness or incapacity to privately admit error or even mere uncertainty, learn from mistakes. Publicly admitting error is too often seen as weak, giving enemies the opening they need to take a person down, but the person who isn't willing to do that even privately is going to push on down a bad road until they drive everyone and everything off a cliff. Sometimes they see changing directions as an implicit and still very public admission of error. I've seen that happen, seen the contract canceled and the entire group fired.

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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday December 03 2015, @10:00PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Thursday December 03 2015, @10:00PM (#271577) Homepage

    There are two types of social retards - those who are assholes and those who aren't.

    Those who aren't are the ones who smell, tell knock-knock jokes, perhaps driving a beat-up Gremlin with Star Trek stickers all over it. Even though they can be annoying at times when they ambush you in the hallway to tell you about some obscure thing for hours on end, they're harmless and often lovable.

    Some are condescending jerks. They are distinguished from the real jerks by not being aware of their jerkdom, jerkdom is not only their nature but they're too stupid to realize it. What those are, are punks in need of a good ass-kicking.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:05PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:05PM (#271604)

      Sadly, there's a significant portion of the clueless jerks who will remain clueless after repeated ass kickings. Used to be the ass kickings got done in school and fixed the fixable, but I wonder if that's still true today.

      --
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