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>Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implan

• eru 4y ago
  I don't know whether your model is accurate, but it's plausible enough that the paper should address it.
• mschuster91 4y ago
  > but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators. Only if you're importing their managers. Managers focused on MBA crap are bad enough for corporate culture, but those raised in corporate fiefdoms are even worse. When half of their time is wasted on fighting petty fights with other managers instead of working together with them, they waste the time of those below them as well.
• PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Yes, I'd be curious to know if they identified perpetrators vs victims of toxic workplaces. Someone who is leaving Blizzard because of a scandal where their assaulting other co workers became public is extremely different from someone leaving Blizzard because their manager assaulted them.
  • 77pt77 4y ago
    > I'd be curious to know if they identified perpetrators vs victims of toxic workplaces. Simple. The perpetrators are successful and therefore well adjusted, whereas the victims are defective and have to be excluded lest there be "social contagion". The conclusion is its own justification. Or, as it's fashionable nowadays, the "just world fallacy". A tale as old as time. Edit: You already have a parent comment here doing exactly that. Apparently the healthy environment was at an "hedge fund" out of all industries.
    • xyzelement 4y ago
      I assume your hedge fund comment is a reference to my post, so I'll reply. You'll notice that in the HF scenario I described, there was no perpetrators or victims. It was just a group of professionals doing work in a calm and rational, dare I say, sane, way. So yes, I'll stick with that story as the healthiest place I've ever worked. And in the other 3 companies I've worked, I've seen lots of examples of employees making themselves crazy en masse when the "trigger" was obviously something not worthy of that reaction.
  • gopher_space 4y ago
    If you came up in a toxic environment that will be all that you know. Good people will come out of certain shops thinking that e.g. firing the bottom % of employees is just something you do and tank all their projects. The perpetrators and victims are all the same people.
    • mpl 4y ago
      I think I agree with this, but there are also other causes. Some time ago, I left a toxic shop to join a new company. I found myself aggressively fighting against things that I perceived as toxic based on my previous experience. Even if I was 100% correct (and I certainly wasn't), adding to the negativity wasn't helpful.
• golergka 4y ago
  You have an implicit assumption that people in toxic organizations are split into two binary categories of perpetrators and victims. In my experience, in toxic orgs everybody thinks of themselves as victims, and everybody perpetuates toxic behaviors to some extent. Also, your comment is talking about value judgements (talk about blame), whereas the quoted text doesn't have them — it is not saying who's the bad guy, it's just saying what will happen, statistically speaking.
  • watwut 4y ago
    I have explicitly seen twice now a manager to come in and make everything toxic purely by herself being toxic. And I have seen a leader to create non-toxic environment. The fact is, managers sets the tone. And when the culture is toxic, the rot comes from the head. Individuals on lower levels can be toxic too, but that spills on others only when management fails. That thing "the effect was most pronounced in case of a new managers". That is a manager coming in, creating toxic environment and people who are under his/her power adjusting to the situation or leaving.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • seizethecheese 4y ago
    In fact, this behavior of splitting everyone into perpetrators and victims is a toxic behavior.
• steponlego 4y ago
  Is it unreasonable to suspect that depressed people can spread their attitudes to other people? The concept of purely social diseases is centuries old at this point.
  • michaelt 4y ago
    For depression, perhaps. Misery loves company. But for stress - if you were leaving a job because you found it too stressful, wouldn't you be eager to chill out and take things easy at your new job?
    • parineum 4y ago
      Maybe they're like those people you meet that "hate drama" yet it somehow follows them around every turn.
      • mschuster91 4y ago
        It's similar to domestic violence or unhealthy relationships - many sufferers of that are so used to being treated badly they literally cannot imagine a better world and can't spot red flags.
    • lynx23 4y ago
      This assumes stress always comes from an external source. Most of the stressed-oout people I know actually have anxiety as a personality trait, and stress as a result of it.
    • ejb999 4y ago
      A lot of people create their own stress and are their own worst enemies - you know the type, we all do - when they switch jobs, they don't switch personalities.
  • girvo 4y ago
    Yes it is unreasonable, because depression is not an “attitude”.
• swatcoder 4y ago
  I don’t think you realize how anti-scientific an attitude you’re expressing here. If there is “evidence for the social contagion model”, this kind of analysis would be a natural step in developing hypotheses about where and how to look for it. And if there’s none to be found, those hypotheses will eventually fail to hold. That’s the method. If you choose not to collect data or test hypotheses because you think a question is “most definitely” settled, then you’re not practicing science. You may be saving wasted effort or managing some kind of socio-political dynamic, which may be more important to you, but some people appreciate science specifically for its ability to upend “most definite” knowledge now and then.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    Which part was anti-scientific, offering an alternate hypothesis, or questioning the applicability of the methodology?
• wnkrshm 4y ago
  Though to be fair, the authors argue that in consequence, companies should actively on-board employees to reduce anxiety from uncertainty and unknown expectations.
  • itronitron 4y ago
    Hmm, I wonder why that wasn't the headline?
    • thfuran 4y ago
      Because you can't fit a whole paper in a headline.
• nerdponx 4y ago
  How is it blaming the victims? The initial depressed person that "spreads" their depression to three other people around them is as much a victim as anyone else.
• closeparen 4y ago
  It also sounds like it’s a bad thing. But one of the standard plays for startup executives is to deliberately create an influx of people and culture from Amazon, in order to inject fear and grind into an organization they see as too fat and happy. Not only do they believe this effect exists, they lean into it.
• xyzelement 4y ago
  // The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators Really strong disagree. In every company I've worked at (4 so far) the level of mental illness I can observe among coworkers is directly related to who was hired, not what we do with them. As an obvious example, I worked at a hedge fund that strongly filtered for resilience, ability to overcome obstacles, and desire to grow through tough feedback. Almost everyone I worked with there was rational, calm, and sane as a consequence. At other places where mental attributes weren't considered (so let's say a pure tech interview that doesn't amp up the scenario) you could watch the "crazy" come out of the woodwork there moment something triggered it. And I think specifically you could see them feeding on each other's anxiety in the Slack hangouts, blind, etc. At some point, seeing 400 people have a meltdown about the layoffs that happened, on daily basis for months, takes a toll on you that's worse than the impact of the layoff itself. So yes I see the chorus of crazies impact everyone negatively.
  • ChuckMcM 4y ago
    And then there are psychopathic workplaces where management hires anxious and vulnerable employees in order to maintain their own sense of dominance over those who work for them. I talked with a managerial candidate once who considered this a "good strategy" because "you can make them work 80 hrs a week and they won't complain". At the end of that interview I wasn't sure if I should call social services or not. It was pretty deeply unsettling for me.
    • ikekkdcjkfke 4y ago
      Well a slave needs a slave driver, there's a place for everything
    • xyzelement 4y ago
      That sounds horrible. And very likely not totally uncommon. But I think that's orthogonal to whether hiring crazy people makes other people in your company crazier.
• dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators I think that part of it is that certain policies, procedures, techniques, etc are more likely to exasperate mental health issues than others. If someone is coming from a disfunctional organization they might introduce some of those behaviors to the team, even at a lower level. I worked with an ex faang employee that complained about the stressful culture, while advocating for the policies and tech of that culture.
  • thyrsus 4y ago
    For exasperate, I think you meant exacerbate.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  I don't think it's correct or accurate to characterize people who are dejected (among more severe things) as perpetrators, as though they were already negative personalities, or "no" people, or some other form of inconducive to a positive work environment: 1) It is entirely possible that a subset of this population organically "grew" this mentality as a result of their previous work environment. I'll admit that early in my career I in fact may have been such a person-- I came from a confrontational environment filled with vicious shouting matches complete with the most vile language you might think of. That was very much not my personality but when I moved on, though I knew that extreme was not usual, it took me a little bit to realize that even a very mild version of it wasn't the norm. (I was also massively, clinically depressed)And given my personality, I was probably a little more shy, withdrawn, that sort of thing. I can easily imagine another person emulating behavior from an awful environment that they grew to think of as the norm. And it was a positive work environment that helped me through, and become a productive group member (professionally. the depression still sucked) 2) Someone with a clinical mental disorder really shouldn't be labelled a a perpetrator. The connotation there is one of deliberate intent. And the fact that such things may go undiagnosed in the clinical sense should also be considered. None of this is intended to dispute the findings of this article. Though it's an observational study rather than one with an intervention of some sort, so a bit of caution is probably prudent, but it's also a large scale study which helps in that area. But sure, the study may even be accurate for clinical/pre-clinical people but that doesn't make them perpetrators. They should be treated as people who may simply need a little more mentorship or collegiality in order to find their place in the organization. (or encouraged to seek clinical help if that seems in order)
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    When the GP was talking about perpetrators, they meant "people who induce depression and anxiety in others". In the context of workplace-associated depression and anxiety, there are people whose management styles cause these problems. People who put undue pressure on others, who demean and berate etc. Now, these same people may be themselves victims of others doing the same, or they may suffer from their own mental issues, or they may be just be ruthless. But either way, the alternate hypothesis was that hiring this kind of people is more likely to be the cause of the observed effect, rather than any idea of "social contagion".