5 ms·

To me, this article reads as an excuse for the company to behave in a sociopathic way, and then turn around and try to pin the blame on some employee when they

by p4wnc6 11y ago

To me, this article reads as an excuse for the company to behave in a sociopathic way, and then turn around and try to pin the blame on some employee when they (perhaps rightfully) stand up for themselves. I've been in situations where people performed blatant religious discrimination towards me, and also threatened to reduce my wage due to discussing pay with a coworker (threatening any form of retaliation for discussing pay is blatantly illegal). The company easily could have raised some of these same complaints towards me just to try to leverage their comparably greater resources to pin blame on the worker rather than own up to the all too common sociopathic tendencies that develop inside bureaucracies. In the end, both this comment and the parent article are just anecdotes. But I say it's a better prior to be more skeptical of managers/higher-ups/bureaucrats who are willing to drop the "psychopath" nuke on behavior they don't like, than the toxic employee.

algirau 11y ago
Well to be frank, I am sharing an experience dealing with a problem member in a 5 person startup. You are correct it is an anecdote. One I want to share in hopes no one has to go through a similar issue. Your victimization does not mean every member-company transgression is due to the company. Minority members that have insider information can do serious damage and not care of the legal ramifications when there are obvious consequence to them.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I understand that not every member-company transgression is due to the company. But sources like Moral Mazes give us a vast set of evidence to believe that companies are intrinsically organized to be able to commit such transgressions without ever bearing responsibility for them, and that extraordinary effort is put forward to create organizational frameworks that codify exactly this manner of villifying worker victims and coordinating across organizations to create workplace cultural norms such that any action of standing up for one's self is deemed "unprofessional" or "not becoming of a true team player" or whatever other HR code word you want, all the way up, apparently, to "psychopath." In this sense, we ought to be more willing to apply skepticism to the company, and more skeptical in general that things like company charter documents, HR policies, company handbooks, or even just email memos about company culture and policy (the more likely case in a start-up), are designed to create legal deniability for the pursuit of illegal and irrational whims of executives, and truly nothing more. This is so much the modus operandi of companies in general, start-up or otherwise, that until after we account for the huge base rate of company-initiated transgressions, it just has little relevance to focus so much on the "toxic" employee. In fact, one of the most successful scams of the organizational HR world is to draw so much disproportionate attention to the scarecrow "toxic employee." Both of my worst experiences with outright fraudulent and corrupt managers have come at start-ups, where there wasn't even the thin veneer of an HR apparatus to even pay lip service to protecting us from executive whims. Now, having said all that, I can certainly still agree that your case might be an exception. But I would prefer if your article was written more that way: that when this happens on the part of an employee, it's generally very rare and the best thing for the company to do is try to learn how they could have handled it better (read: publicly calling someone something as incendiary as "psychopath" is not it, even if it were true), and voiciferously acknowledge that in the vast, vast majority of cases, it is the company being toxic, not the employee who responds by standing up for herself.

by p4wnc6 11y ago

algirau 11y ago

Well to be frank, I am sharing an experience dealing with a problem member in a 5 person startup. You are correct it is an anecdote. One I want to share in hopes no one has to go through a similar issue. Your victimization does not mean every member-company transgression is due to the company. Minority members that have insider information can do serious damage and not care of the legal ramifications when there are obvious consequence to them.

p4wnc6 11y ago
I understand that not every member-company transgression is due to the company. But sources like Moral Mazes give us a vast set of evidence to believe that companies are intrinsically organized to be able to commit such transgressions without ever bearing responsibility for them, and that extraordinary effort is put forward to create organizational frameworks that codify exactly this manner of villifying worker victims and coordinating across organizations to create workplace cultural norms such that any action of standing up for one's self is deemed "unprofessional" or "not becoming of a true team player" or whatever other HR code word you want, all the way up, apparently, to "psychopath." In this sense, we ought to be more willing to apply skepticism to the company, and more skeptical in general that things like company charter documents, HR policies, company handbooks, or even just email memos about company culture and policy (the more likely case in a start-up), are designed to create legal deniability for the pursuit of illegal and irrational whims of executives, and truly nothing more. This is so much the modus operandi of companies in general, start-up or otherwise, that until after we account for the huge base rate of company-initiated transgressions, it just has little relevance to focus so much on the "toxic" employee. In fact, one of the most successful scams of the organizational HR world is to draw so much disproportionate attention to the scarecrow "toxic employee." Both of my worst experiences with outright fraudulent and corrupt managers have come at start-ups, where there wasn't even the thin veneer of an HR apparatus to even pay lip service to protecting us from executive whims. Now, having said all that, I can certainly still agree that your case might be an exception. But I would prefer if your article was written more that way: that when this happens on the part of an employee, it's generally very rare and the best thing for the company to do is try to learn how they could have handled it better (read: publicly calling someone something as incendiary as "psychopath" is not it, even if it were true), and voiciferously acknowledge that in the vast, vast majority of cases, it is the company being toxic, not the employee who responds by standing up for herself.