I believe it's a pit of success vs pit of doom matter. Without a toxic employee, everyone is focusing on work, team cohesion is high, people are encouraged to e

I believe it's a pit of success vs pit of doom matter. Without a toxic employee, everyone is focusing on work, team cohesion is high, people are encouraged to emulate the good behavior of everyone else, etc. Once you introduce the toxic employee, all of that changes - at first people simply learn to ignore them, but the tension introduced in the atmosphere slowly moves you towards the pit of doom. The stress from having to deal with their toxicity leads to you reacting negatively in a situation where you would have laughed it off; Low-friction problems that used to be oiled by the team's happy outlook now suddenly turn into arguments. The team can definitely beat this trend, self-organize, ostracize the toxic employee and distance themselves from them. This however requires a conscious effort and active participation from everyone. For some teams, that might work, and you might say "they were not just a great team in a well-managed workplace". For others, the influence might degenerate into a spiral of negativity, and you might say "well it was a toxic workplace in general". I'm not sure it's easy to make the determination whether the workplace was "toxic in general" or not, but I know that humans are fallible. Following the pit of success mantra, you don't really want to test whether your team is really resilient and cohesive, instead, you want to make sure that in most cases they don't even have to exhibit conscious effort to work together effectively. Of course, the pit of success takes a lot of behind-the-scenes effort from management. I would be happy to place the blame on them here, although sometimes "the problem" is not obvious and easy to solve.