The Science of Fixing Toxic Workplace Culture
Abstract
This article examines compelling research from the Center for Emotional Well-being on transforming toxic workplace cultures through the engagement-entanglement framework. While traditional approaches to workplace toxicity have focused on leadership behavior, social norms, and work design, the Center's research introduces a more comprehensive paradigm that measures an organization's capacity to engage rather than entangle employees. The ROI360 Cultural Dynamics Inventory assessment provides Chief Human Resources Officers with a scientifically validated tool to identify specific intervention points, implement focused solutions, and track measurable improvements in organizational culture. This research demonstrates that organizations with engagement-based cultures consistently outperform those with entanglement-based cultures across key performance indicators, making cultural transformation a strategic business imperative rather than merely a human resources initiative.
Keywords
Toxic Culture, Stress, Engagement, Leadership, Organizational Maturity
Table of Contents Show
The Engagement vs. Entanglement Framework: A New Paradigm
At the core of the Center's research is the discovery that toxic workplace cultures fundamentally stem from whether an organization's strategic framework, people framework, and leadership styles engage or entangle employees. High entanglement equals low performance, while high engagement equals high performance. This insight provides Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) with a clear, actionable path toward cultural transformation.
Organizational Entanglement occurs in a toxic workplace culture characterized by low to moderate organizational maturity, where individuals and systems remain inappropriately bound to past patterns, conflicts, and ineffective dynamics. It manifests when organizational structures, processes, and leadership approaches lack the maturity to facilitate healthy interactions, causing people to resort to dysfunctional behaviors to meet their needs. This creates a workplace where emotional tethering to past experiences limits growth, innovation, adaptability, employee engagement, and performance. Leaders in entangled organizations often unwittingly perpetuate these patterns through inconsistent frameworks and immature leadership practices.
Organizational Engagement occurs in a high-performing workplace culture characterized by organizational maturity, where individuals and systems operate from present-focused awareness and future possibilities. It manifests when organizational structures, processes, and leadership approaches consistently create conditions for healthy need fulfillment through constructive collaboration and meaningful connection. In engaged organizations, mature frameworks guide interactions, freeing cognitive and emotional resources for higher performance and innovation. Leaders in these organizations model and facilitate mature relationship patterns that build rather than deplete organizational capacity.
When people understand how to engage each other and their work in the workplace, performance can skyrocket.
The Research
In a beta test of the ROI360 platform, 50 participants from one company took the CDI. We ran a reliability test on these responses using Cronbach's alpha. It measures how well a group of questions in a survey or test work together to measure the same thing. Researchers use it to ensure that their surveys or tests are reliable—that is, they consistently measure what they're supposed to measure. It helps them feel confident that when they ask these questions, they're really getting at the thing they want to understand, whether that's happiness, customer satisfaction, or any other concept that's hard to measure directly. In this case, the construct we wanted to understand was healthy organizational cultures.
Cronbach's alpha gives us a number between 0 and 1 that tells us how well these questions agree with each other. The closer to 1, the more the questions work together to measure the same thing. It's like checking if all the instruments in an orchestra are playing the same tune.
If Cronbach's alpha is close to 1, all your questions are singing in harmony. They're likely measuring the same thing well. If Cronbach's alpha is close to 0, it’s like each question is singing a different song. They might not be measuring the same thing at all. A perfect 1 could suggest that the test isn't capturing different aspects or nuances of what you're trying to measure. Thus, it is good to be close to 1 but not an exact one.
The results from this beta-test revealed compelling Cronbach’s alpha scores of .912 for engagement and .935 for entanglement. See Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Cronbach’s alpha from a beta test of 50 participants.
Our HR contact had this to say about the results:
The CDI “provided our organization with invaluable data. The data collected was very worthwhile and saved us an enormous amount of time. As a result, we are implementing action plans that will have substantial impact to our organization. The feedback makes our actions sustainable and ensures we will continue elevating our organization. The bonus was that it was easy to gain buy-in from employees as they participated in the completion of the assessment. This is a game changer and based on data-driven metrics. I highly recommend this purposeful tool.”
The CDI precisely measures where organizations fall on the critical spectrum of engagement versus entanglement, identifying specific intervention points that can transform a toxic culture into a thriving one.
Supporting Research: Traditional Drivers of Toxic Culture
The Center's engagement-entanglement framework is supported by MIT research that identified three traditional predictors of toxic behavior in the workplace: Leadership Behavior, Social Norms, and Work Design.
According to the MIT research, leadership consistently emerges as the strongest predictor of toxic culture. This finding underscores a fundamental reality: leaders cannot improve corporate culture unless they are willing to hold themselves and their colleagues accountable for toxic behavior, i.e. they engage rather than entangle. This applies to both senior executives who set the organizational tone and middle managers who create distinctive microcultures within their teams.
Social norms define expected and acceptable behaviors in day-to-day interactions. While a company might list "respect" among its core values, it's the specific behaviors like "taking time to learn employees' names" or "not keeping colleagues waiting for meetings" that translate abstract values into concrete actions. These norms can exist within specific teams or across the entire organization.
When a culture doesn’t have a strategic framework (purpose, mission, vision, and values) or has one but has low adoption, and when it doesn’t have a strong people framework (employee know what it takes to succeed at the company) or has one but has low adoption, it entangles. It does that because social norms are unclear or leaders don’t follow them. Employees don’t know what to expect or how to show up. We often hear this referred to as “I wonder what the flavor of the day will be today.”
The third key area where leaders can focus efforts to detoxify culture is work design. Decades of research have identified elements such as overall workload and conflicting job demands that consistently predict toxic behavior outcomes. Poor work design entangles because it causes conflict.
The Power of Engagement vs. Entanglement
Our research has revealed that organizations fall into one of two fundamental cultural states: Engagement-Based Cultures, which are the path to excellence, and Entanglement-Based Cultures, which are a source of toxicity.
Why? Because strategic frameworks provide clear direction and purpose, people-centered practices prioritize development and well-being, and effective leadership inspires and empowers team members.
Toxic cultures stem primarily from entanglement dynamics, where employees feel trapped rather than enabled. These cultures create confused or contradictory strategic priorities, causing organizational paralysis, people practices that emphasize control over development, breeding resentment, and leadership that micromanages and diminishes employee agency, leading to disengagement.
ROI360: The Scientifically-Validated Solution
For CHROs facing the challenge of toxic culture, the ROI360 platform offers the only scientifically validated approach to measuring and transforming organizational culture through the CDI. Unlike traditional survey tools, ROI360 precisely identifies the engagement-entanglement balance in your organization, conflict hotspots, and organizational trust issues requiring immediate intervention, reveals the exact root causes of high stress and poor engagement, measures leadership effectiveness across all organizational levels, and provides quantifiable year-over-year improvement metrics that demonstrate clear ROI.
ROI360 includes a visual dashboard that makes the organization’s data actionable, helping CHROs communicate findings to other executives. The data is easy to use and easy to access.
The CHRO's Strategic Pathway
For CHROs committed to transforming toxic cultures, the Center for Emotional Well-being's research reveals a clear implementation strategy:
1. Deploy the ROI360 CDI assessment to establish your baseline. This process takes about three weeks, as it is crucial to roll out the program to your employees meaningfully. A project plan and timeline are shared upon hire.
2. After data collection (about 14 days, and the dashboard is automatically populated as responses are received), ROI360 Consultants will provide a debrief that interprets the data and suggests critical next steps focused on the specific engagement-entanglement imbalances revealed by the results.
3. Implement tailored transformation initiatives focusing on the organizational hotspots revealed by the data.
4. Track progress using ROI360's scientific benchmarking.
By following this evidence-based approach, CHROs can deliver measurable transformation within months rather than years, positioning themselves as strategic drivers of organizational excellence.
Conclusion
The transformation of toxic workplace cultures represents one of the most significant challenges—and opportunities—facing organizations today. The Center for Emotional Well-being's research on the engagement-entanglement framework offers CHROs a powerful new paradigm for understanding and addressing workplace toxicity. By shifting focus from merely mitigating negative behaviors to actively nurturing engagement through aligned strategic frameworks, people-centered practices, and empowering leadership, organizations can achieve measurable improvements in productivity, retention, innovation, and customer satisfaction.
The ROI360 platform stands alone as the scientifically validated solution that transforms this theoretical understanding into practical implementation. By providing precise measurement of engagement-entanglement dynamics, identifying specific intervention points, and tracking quantifiable improvements, ROI360 enables CHROs to position themselves as strategic drivers of organizational performance rather than merely custodians of employee satisfaction.
As organizations continue to navigate increasingly complex business environments, creating and maintaining healthy, engagement-based cultures will become an even more critical competitive advantage. CHROs leveraging the Center for Emotional Well-being's research and the ROI360 platform will be uniquely positioned to deliver this advantage, transforming their organizations and securing their roles as essential strategic partners in driving sustainable business success.
References
Sull, D., & Sull, C. (2022, September 28). How to Fix a Toxic Culture. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-fix-a-toxic-culture/.
