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.

Read the full article here.