Toxic Workplace!: Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power

Part II. The Toxic Organization Change System Model

Leaders have three avenues to address toxicity in organizations:

• The large organization system, covered in Chapter Five

• The smaller team system, described in Chapter Six

• One-on-one interventions directly with the toxic individual, reviewed in Chapter Seven

Before we focus on these three levels, however, we would like to provide you with an overall road map of these avenues for change. Our Toxic Organization Change System (TOCS) model is dynamic and reflects the belief that any change in the system affects all other parts of the system either directly or indirectly. This is commonly known as the butterfly effect, conceptualized by meteorologist Edward Lorenz's discovery in the 1960s that large-scale ...