A topic too near and not-so-dear to my heart: workplace dysfunction. I’ve held jobs in a variety of workplace environments that did not tolerate dysfunction. These organizations offered their employees welcome opportunities to build fulfilling careers, grow levels of creativity and innovation and foster lasting friendships. Other organizations offered nothing better than nightmare experiences, where toxic bosses ruled in command and control environments with unchecked power and careers were derailed and employee psyches were left reeling with damage. Sadly, the atmosphere of a dysfunctional workplace leads to a deadly mantra: throw every weak link under the bus.

Dysfunction kills innovation, creativity, collaboration, relationships, friendships, the employee, and the organization. Not immediately, but over time. Death by dysfunction is dictated by the economic environment, organization’s positioning, and the importance of the organization’s products and/or services. Dysfunction severely damages a company’s ability to grow, because employees simply shut down and become disengaged. ”

A dysfunctional environment wastes incredible amounts of time and energy,” says Roxanne Emmerich. ” Managers know how much time is spent dealing with dysfunctional employees. And functional employees know how much energy is drained by those who are busy driving everyone else stark raving mad.” Emmerich introduces the basic problems caused by dysfunction, including efficiency and productivity shortcuts, customer loss, increased employee sick days and work avoidance. Emmerich also states in her column, “Gallup estimates [in 2009] that a typical organization has $3,400 of lost productivity for every $10,000 of payroll due to ‘disengaged employees’—one of the primary symptoms of dysfunction.”

The Top Ten Dysfunctions:

1. People being at odds with each other with no desire to fix it
2. Saying one thing and meaning another
3. Giving lip service to new ideas, then undercutting them in private
4. Defensiveness at reasonable suggestions
5. Attraction to chaos
6. Not following through on commitments
7. Deflecting blame
8. People pretending like they ‘never got the memo’
9. Refusing to deal with conflict directly
10. Gossiping and Backstabbing – the absolute worst contributor to dysfunction in the workplace

Read the article and learn more about the top 10 dysfunctions and their cures at Thank God It’s Monday