Most organisations do not set out to become toxic. Yet many end up tolerating behaviours that harm people, erode trust, and damage performance.
A new paper by Mergen and colleagues (2026), published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, offers a powerful explanation. Their framework, called the Toxicity Normalization Cascade, shows how harmful practices can gradually become accepted, routine, and extremely difficult to reverse.
The key insight is this: workplace toxicity rarely begins with malicious individuals. Instead, it often emerges from systemic organisational pressures that slowly shape how people think, behave, and justify their actions.
The researchers identify four organisational pressures that can trigger this process.
First, environmental uncertainty. When employees receive conflicting signals about what success looks like, they often focus on the clearest measurable indicators, even if these distort priorities.
Second, power asymmetry. When authority and decision making are highly concentrated, employees may feel that questioning harmful practices carries personal risk.
Third, temporal compression. Constant urgency and time pressure reduce the space for reflection, making quick, instrumental decisions more likely.
Fourth, social density. When behaviour is highly visible and constantly evaluated by others, conformity becomes the safest option.
Under these conditions, people adapt in ways that initially feel practical or necessary. Over time, however, these adaptations create powerful psychological and cultural shifts.
The authors highlight four mechanisms that gradually normalise harmful behaviour.
• Cognitive simplification, where complex ethical questions are reduced to simple performance metrics
• Moral rationalisation, where questionable behaviour is reframed as necessary or beneficial
• Identity alignment, where individuals begin to identify with the group norms that justify the behaviour
• Behavioural entrenchment, where repeated actions become routine and no longer require reflection
Through repeated interactions, these behaviours spread across teams and become embedded in organisational culture. Eventually, what once seemed unacceptable starts to feel normal, even expected.
Perhaps the most important contribution of the framework is its explanation of why toxic cultures persist.
Once these norms take hold, organisations often unknowingly recreate the very conditions that allowed them to emerge. Hiring, promotion decisions, reward systems and performance metrics begin to favour behaviours aligned with the toxic culture. This creates a self reinforcing cycle that can survive leadership changes, policy reforms, and even regulatory intervention.
For leaders, the implication is clear. Tackling toxicity cannot rely solely on addressing individual behaviour. Sustainable change requires examining the systems and organisational pressures that shape behaviour in the first place.
Inclusive leadership plays a critical role here. Leaders who create psychological safety, encourage constructive challenge, and design systems that value fairness and respect can interrupt the cascade before harmful patterns become normalised.
At Inclusive Leadership Company, much of our work focuses on helping organisations identify these hidden systemic pressures, through leadership assessment, diagnostics, and coaching that supports leaders to build healthier and more inclusive cultures.
Because in most organisations, toxicity is not inevitable. But preventing it requires intentional leadership and thoughtful organisational design.
You can read the original article here.
