Measure Toxic Culture Before It Destroys Brand Trust.
Growth Without Culture Creates Organizational Toxicity
Uber's 2017 crisis exposed how prioritizing growth over culture destroys organizations. A high-profile sexual harassment case and reports of an aggressive "win at all costs" mentality created public relations catastrophe. The company asked Frances Frei, Harvard Business School professor, to repair the damage. She rewrote cultural values with input from thousands of employees and rolled out educational courses for more than 3,000 managers. Founder Travis Kalanick was ultimately forced to resign.
Anne Morriss, co-author of Move Fast & Fix Things, defines culture as "all the unwritten rules of work." Bad company culture tamps innovation, leads to high turnover, and hampers productivity. Wells Fargo employees opened millions of fake accounts to make sales commission quotas—direct result of toxic culture.
Five Specific Behaviors Tank Employee Satisfaction Scores
Charlie Sull and his father Donald Sull founded CultureX in 2020 to take a data-driven approach to defining toxic culture. They analyzed over 1.4 million anonymous employee reviews from more than 500 of the largest US employers posted on Glassdoor.
The Sulls identified the "Toxic Five": disrespectful behavior, abusive behavior, unethical behavior, cutthroat competition, and noninclusive behavior. When employees mentioned these five shortcomings, they brought reviews down by a full star.
Research also found toxic workplace culture leads to far more staff turnover than bad pay. This became critical during the Great Resignation in 2021 and 2022. Now that the job market has shrunk, appetite to improve culture has dissipated. "When employees are quitting a lot, then leadership really cares about this issue," Sull says.
Boeing's Culture Shift from Innovation to Profit Caused Safety Disasters
In 2024, a fuselage panel blew out on a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane mid-flight. One more in a long list of incidents including two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
Experts blamed weak company culture. They point to a slow shift from one focused on innovation to one focused on profit, starting with entry of executives from McDonnell Douglas in the late 1990s. Emphasis on financial metrics led to a culture of fear. Employee concerns went ignored.
Current CEO Kelly Ortberg admitted after six months in office: "The thing I wish I could change is how we deal with each other. We're very insular. We don't communicate across boundaries as well."
Executive Teams Must Drive Cultural Transformation
Low-level employees embedded in toxic company culture making efforts to change things will fight a losing battle. "Culture is this systemic force that's affecting everyone," says Sull. "Toxic culture isn't something that can be fixed from the bottom; it's not something that can be fixed from the middle. You need the executive team pulling all these different levers."
Leaders need hard data on what the culture actually is. New AI tools can take an organization's pulse much faster and more accurately than surveys employees dread.
Good company culture is often seen as a "nice-to-have," adds Morriss. But she views it as essential: "It's this huge performance variable that will dictate the trajectory of your company."
Recommendations
Establish executive-level ownership of culture transformation, middle management cannot overcome systemic toxic forces without C-suite lever-pulling.
Deploy AI-powered pulse tools that capture real-time employee sentiment.
Track the Toxic Five metrics, disrespect, abuse, unethical behavior, cutthroat competition, noninclusion.
Build psychological safety by training managers to normalize idea-sharing and mistake-admitting without repercussions.
Create transparent communication channels where employees can flag problems without fear.
Bottom Line: Executive Commitment and Data Measurement Fix Toxic Culture.
Organizations prioritizing growth over culture risk toxic environments that destroy trust and damage brand reputation—as Uber, Wells Fargo, and Boeing demonstrated. The Toxic Five behaviors tank satisfaction scores by full star ratings. Transformation requires executive teams pulling multiple levers simultaneously and hard data showing what culture actually is. Culture determines organizational trajectory, innovation speed, and trust levels.
