Stop Quiet Quitting by Making the Office Non-Toxic

Recent data shows that U.S. workers’ productivity levels are falling, a recent Gallup poll shows only 32% of U.S. workers feel “engaged” in their jobs, and the media is awash in articles focusing on employee burnout, work-from-home versus back-to-the-office arrangements and “quiet quitting,” which means non-union employees choosing only to do what is in their official job duties as though they were unionized. Many analyses tie these trends to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic no doubt brought these work-life issues to a head, quiet quitting and decreased employee productivity are at least partially due to fundamental changes to work-life balance over the past 20 years as well as toxic leadership in the workplace. The good news is that leaders can keep their employees engaged at work by avoiding harmful leadership behaviors, like narcissistic abuse, which create toxic workplaces.

Over the past 20 years, technology and management theory have changed how office work is done in ways that make it more difficult for employees to achieve a reasonable work-life balance. Back then, office work was conducted in the physical office because of technological limitations. There was also a higher level of administrative support, such as secretaries, and many workers had their own private offices with doors that shut so they could concentrate on doing work. Since then, most workplaces have cut their administrative staffing – shifting low-skill, routine work formerly performed by support specialists to higher-skilled workers without reducing the higher-skilled workers’ other duties – and expect employees to monitor email and perform other work outside of normal business hours too. Many workplaces have also switched to “open office” formats, which, contrary to expectations, actually reduce employee collaboration in real life, with face-to-face interactions in open offices decreasing by as much as 70%, according to research published by The Royal Society. Other research shows open offices also decrease employees’ satisfaction with their work and increase stress and exhaustion, largely due to workers’ inability to control noise and interruptions.

Fair leaders who treat people with respect, however, can keep employees engaged despite workers today being asked to do more work, work longer hours, and do so in spaces less conducive to productivity compared to 20 years ago. Massachusetts Institute of Technology research shows that keeping employees engaged depends primarily on factors like perceived fairness by management and whether employees can trust their managers. Employees not having control over how their job is carried out also drives burnout. In other words, employee engagement appears to be driven more by the absence of negative leadership traits in managers – such as abusive supervision, micromanaging and bullying – than it is by happy talk about corporate vision and employee wellness. In fact, leaders paying lip service to issues like employee wellness while ignoring or suppressing negatives occurring in real life results in “toxic positivity,” which is even more harmful to employee engagement because it invalidates the employees’ personal experiences and individual worth.

Excessive narcissism by leaders is probably the main culprit behind toxic workplaces that drives employees to disengage. Narcissism is broadly defined as a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy. Individuals with narcissistic personalities often pursue leadership positions because leadership gives them power over other people, allows them to control their environment better and improves their public image. As a threshold matter, narcissistic leaders have a mixed record: Many successful companies have had senior leaders who have been labeled as narcissists, yet many companies that have failed were led to their doom by overly narcissistic leaders as well.

Psychological researchers call this paradox the corporate “narcissism-leadership-performance puzzle.” It turns out that a moderate degree of narcissism by a company’s leadership can be beneficial to an organization, especially in an entrepreneurial context or when coupled with humility, but leaders who are excessively narcissistic derail workplaces by turning them toxic. According to one researcher, these sorts of narcissists “prevent good things from happening” in the workplace.

The problem is that individuals with very high levels of narcissism – “malignant narcissism,” as it is called, which is essentially a blend of narcissism and anti-social behavior – actually have a sort of false self-confidence where their psychology drives them to tear other people down to make themselves feel better. While they often seem self-assured, malignant narcissists actually have low self-esteem coupled with unhealthy coping mechanisms that often involve denial, pathological lying, gaslighting, becoming enraged when things do not go their way, and belittling or embarrassing other people as a psychological defense mechanism. Many malignant narcissists are grandiose and aggressive, but some are introverted “covert narcissists” who hide their narcissism by acting like victims as well as by lashing out with passive aggressive behaviors.

While malignant narcissists are typically unable to change their behavior because their pathology is too deeply ingrained, the rest of us can learn from their mistakes. Examples of narcissistic abuse include belittling, bullying, unfair criticism or blaming, manipulating others through trickery, emotional blackmail (such as trying to make people feel fear, obligation or guilt), gaslighting (i.e. insisting that an individual’s perception of reality is faulty, such as by claiming “you imagined that”), lying, defamation and sabotaging others. These abusive behaviors are especially pernicious in the workplace because malignant narcissist supervisors have real power over their employees and can take revenge by engaging in character assassination even against workers who choose to quit.

Many malignant narcissists deny reality when reality does not fit how they want things to be, much like the naked emperor in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” who insisted he was finely dressed. As a result, they often do not tolerate people having differing opinions and like to use a tactic called DARVO, which stands for “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.” This holds true even when the other person is a licensed professional giving a professional opinion. For example, a malignant narcissist executive who does not like a Certified Public Accountant’s presentation of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) because it shows a net loss may insist that the accountant “just doesn’t know” GAAP and is therefore “putting the organization at risk” by presenting a loss and must “correct” their work so that the financial results show net income, or face punishment for incompetence. While NCUA Inspector General Material Loss Reviews do not typically opine on the issue of narcissism, credit union failures where the Inspector General found that the CEO embezzled funds from their credit union often involved CEOs who displayed many of the same behaviors as textbook malignant narcissists.

Leaders who treat employees fairly and avoid engaging in toxic leadership behaviors are ahead in the game even if they are not great managers. This is because the toxic positivity problem means that toxic behavior by leaders that goes unaddressed basically ruins everything. In addition to creating a work-life balance more like what existed 20 years ago and giving employees private offices to work in, simply being fair and truthful to workers and avoiding abusive behaviors should keep your workplace non-toxic and your employees actively engaged and productive.

Michael S. Edwards Credit Union Compliance & Regulatory Lawyer Upper Marlboro, Md.