How HR can prevent a broken corporate structure from causing workplace toxicity

Your organization might be toxic…and not in a techno-Brittany-Spears-music-video kind of way, but in a broken-corporate-structure kind of way.

Broken hierarchies can lead to toxic workplaces, according to Nir Halevy, organizational behavior professor at Stanford University and author of Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them.

Halevy shared with HR Brew how to identify broken hierarchies and what HR can do to fix them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

We all have this collective responsibility to fix broken hierarchies together. There are countless harms caused by broken hierarchies to individual well-being, to team performance, to organizational success. And, it should not be delegated just to HR role holders in organizations, and it shouldn’t be just the responsibility of top management teams to fix broken hierarchies. There are things that we can all do…to make sure that we work in a place that is thriving and supporting our needs.

What makes a company’s hierarchy broken?

Broken hierarchies tend to be ultra-competitive, unjust, and unstable…You have peers, colleagues who are competing with you ceaselessly for opportunities, for commission, for promotions, for resources, and that environment feels like a constant threat. It feels like a never-ending tournament. It produces stress.

When we think about injustice, there are really three kinds of unfairness employees encounter. We think about distributed injustice, where we don’t get what we deserve, so we don’t get the promotion, the salary, the recognition that we deserve. We can think about procedural unfairness [as] we are receiving decisions that are arbitrary, and they’re not justified or explained to us, and we can think about interactional injustice, where we are the victims of harassment, abuse, demeaning, mistreatment, things that no one should put up with in an organization.

Finally, when we think about instability, we’re talking about unexpected, swift promotions, and demotions, departures from the organization. Power struggles near the top, and a lot of concern and worry, and even paranoia, on other ranks in the organization. People are worried that they don’t know what to expect in the near or in the long-term future.

In other words, a broken hierarchy could mean a toxic workplace?

Definitely, and we’ve done work previously on identifying how the hierarchy can generate toxicity in particular locations. For example, we’ve identified roles that combine high power and low status [are] particularly toxic compounds. When people are holding a role that is not held in high regard, that the person in that role is not respected, and appreciated, and recognized for the contributions they’re making to their team or their organization, they have negative feelings…When you have the combination of high power with low status with these negative feelings, you tend to act on these negative feelings and demean, mistreat others, and behave in abusive ways.

What can HR do to fix broken hierarchies?

We diagnose and then we treat. So, first, we do diagnosis, and there are certain things that will be apparent very early. So, an HR professional might notice difficulties with retention, difficulties with recruiting…In terms of the treatment, the recommendation I develop in the book is a CPR framework. C stands for common value, P for pluralism, and R for relatedness.

Common value really has two elements. We want to create a hierarchy that reflects who we are, who we wish to be, what we live in, but we also want to create a hierarchy that benefits everyone in terms of promoting our collective welfare, not just the people at the top…The pluralism principle really suggests that we want to have hierarchies that enable multiple pathways to contributing, thriving, ascending, and leading within the organization…and the R in CPR stands for relatedness. We want a hierarchy that brings people closer together rather than pulls them apart.