A Conversation about Navigating Workplace Undermining and Job Insecurity

[00:00:00] So, um, I want you to take a second and just picture your workplace right now. Think about the collaborative meetings, the shared spreadsheets, the whole, you know, team player rhetoric that is probably plastered on a wall somewhere in the break room. Yeah, or at least buried deeply in the onboarding handbook, right? Exactly. You get the sense that everyone is, like, rowing in the same direction. It feels comforting to believe that when the company wins. Well, everybody wins.

[00:00:28] But then you kind of have to hit pause on that mental image for a rather jarring reality check. Right. What if I told you that in that very room you're picturing, 69% of the people sitting around that conference table have recently been actively undermined? Like, blamed for something they didn't do or had their best ideas outright stolen by the person sitting right next to them? It completely shatters that illusion of the unified team. Suddenly you aren't looking at collaborators who have your back.

[00:00:56] You're looking at competitors who are, um, quietly keeping score and just waiting for a moment of vulnerability. It turns the modern office into this bizarre, quiet battlefield, you know, where the weapons are forgotten calendar invites and casually misplaced data. And that is exactly our mission for this deep dive today. Yeah, it's such an important topic. We are looking at a highly relevant, honestly, incredibly timely source.

[00:01:23] It's a November 2026 paper by Dr. Jonathan H. Westover titled Watch Your Back. Which is a very fitting title. Totally. And this document synthesizes recent surveys, decades of psychological research and real world corporate case studies. We're talking places like Microsoft, Pixar, Uber. And it does all this to explain exactly why workplaces become completely toxic when jobs feel insecure.

[00:01:48] And for you listening, whether you are leading a massive team across multiple time zones or, you know, you're just trying to navigate your own local office politics without completely losing your mind. This material is vital. Absolutely. We aren't just here to complain about bad HR policies or vent about that one annoying coworker. We are here to understand the hidden mechanics of human behavior under threat. We're basically going to give you the cheat codes to understand why people act terribly at work.

[00:02:16] And more importantly, we're going to look at how to redesign the game so that cooperation actually makes rational sense. Right. Because the core theme running through all this data is that this isn't a story about fundamentally bad people. It is a story about fundamentally bad systems that, well, they incentivize dark behaviors. So let's unpack the sheer scale of this because that 69 percent statistic is just staggering to me.

[00:02:40] It comes from a November 2026 resume builder survey of over a thousand employed U.S. adults. It's a massive number. It really is. Finding out that nearly seven out of 10 people experienced at least one form of workplace undermining in the past year. I mean, it changes how you view the professional world. Oh, absolutely. But what really gets me looking through the details of the survey is the utterly mundane nature of this warfare.

[00:03:07] We aren't talking about cinematic corporate espionage where someone is stealing the secret formula at midnight. No, it's not Hollywood. Right. We are talking about 30 percent of people being blamed for mistakes they didn't make. 26 percent having unnecessary attention called to their errors in public forums. Which is just brutal in a meeting. Oh, the worst. And 21 percent experiencing someone deliberately withholding crucial information.

[00:03:33] Plus, an overwhelming 77 percent of respondents consider backstabbing to be a common everyday occurrence where they work. You know, the everyday insidious nature of it is precisely what makes it so destructive. When a threat is massive and obvious, a team can rally against it. Like a bad quarter or a new competitor. Exactly. But when the threat is a death by a thousand paper cuts, it just erodes the foundation of trust.

[00:03:57] So to really grasp how this functions, the academic research synthesized in the paper breaks these vague everyday annoyances down into three very precise psychological constructs. Okay, let's get into those. So the first is what researchers call social undermining. Now, this is distinct from someone just having a bad day or, you know, being grumpy before their morning coffee. Right. Everyone has bad days. Yeah. But social undermining is intentional hindrance over time.

[00:04:24] It is a sustained campaign designed to gradually damage another person's working relationships, their likelihood of success, and their professional reputation. So it's the premeditation that makes it terrifying. It's not an outburst. It's a strategy. A very conscious strategy. And there is a deeply chilling finding here from a 2002 study by a researcher named Duffy and colleagues that the paper highlights. What did they find?

[00:04:49] Well, they looked at police officers in Slovenia examining the dynamics between peers, and they found something incredibly counterintuitive. When you receive both undermining and support from the same person, it is actually vastly more damaging to your well-being than if they were just consistently awful to you. Wait, really? That seems backward. I know. The assumption usually is that if someone buys you a coffee on Wednesday, it somewhat makes up for them insulting you on Monday. But the data shows that goodwill does not cancel out sabotage.

[00:05:18] Okay, wait. I need to make sure I'm understanding the mechanics of this. So if I have a colleague who goes out of their way to help me troubleshoot a software issue on Tuesday but then completely throws me under the bus in front of the department head on Thursday, Right. The science says that dynamic is actually worse for my mental health than if they just gave me the cold shoulder all week? Significantly worse. A colleague who helps one day and sabotages the next creates a massive cognitive load on your brain. Because you never know what to expect. Exactly.

[00:05:46] When someone is consistently distant or unhelpful, you can categorize them. You put them in a mental box labeled, you know, do not rely on this person, and you adjust your workflow accordingly. You build defenses. That makes total sense. Yeah, you just work around them. Right. But when a person alternates between ally and enemy, the unpredictability shatters your ability to predict the environment. You never know which version of your co-worker is going to show up to the morning stand-up. It's like walking on eggshells. Yes.

[00:06:14] Your brain is constantly on high alert, scanning for hidden traps in their seemingly nice gestures. And this hypervigilance leads to extreme emotional exhaustion. Because trust becomes impossible, but engagement remains necessary. Wow. It sounds like workplace undermining isn't a sudden explosion, you know? It's like a slow leak in a tire. And it's the sheer ambiguity of the situation that makes it maddening. The ambiguity is the worst part. Because if someone screams at you, you can report it to HR.

[00:06:40] But if your name is mysteriously missing from the final presentation slide of a project you worked on for six weeks, well, was that just a formatting typo? Or was it a deliberate assassination attempt on my career? Right. You can't definitively prove either one. Exactly. And plausible deniability is the primary weapon of the saboteur. They rely on that ambiguity. Now, your analogy of the slow leak leads perfectly into the second construct from the research, which is knowledge hiding. Okay. Knowledge hiding. Yeah.

[00:07:07] Now, we have to carefully distinguish this from simply forgetting to reply to an email or being genuinely too busy to train a junior staff member. Knowledge hiding is defined as an intentional attempt to conceal information that someone has explicitly requested and needs to do their job. So it's an active choice to watch someone fail when you literally have the map that could help them. It is. And the paper identifies three distinct flavors of this behavior. First, there is evasive hiding. This is when someone gives you incorrect or incomplete information on purpose.

[00:07:37] Or they, like, cheerfully promise to help you later but fully intend to never follow up. Oh, the fake promise. Yeah. I've seen that. Yeah, they just kick the can down the road until you miss your deadline. Second, there is rationalized hiding. This is where they offer a legitimate-sounding justification. Like what? Like claiming the data is confidential or that they aren't authorized to share it, even when those protocols don't strictly apply to the situation at all. They use bureaucracy as a shield. That is so frustrating. And finally, there is playing dumb.

[00:08:07] Simply looking at you blankly and pretending they don't know what you were talking about. Basically forcing you to go reinvent the wheel. Oh, man. The playing dumb one is infuriating. The whole, oh, I didn't see your message. Or the, let me check on that and get back to you. That just fades into the void. It is the absolute height of passive-aggressive warfare. It really is. Because you can't take them to HR for saying, I don't know, but you know they are lying. Right.

[00:08:31] And across multiple studies, the primary predictor for all three of these forms of hiding is interpersonal distrust. People hide knowledge when they believe that sharing it makes them vulnerable to someone who doesn't have their best interests at heart. Which brings us to the third one, right? Yes. The third and arguably most visceral construct, which is knowledge theft. Let me guess. This is what the rest of us outside of academia just call taking credit for someone else's work. That is exactly it.

[00:08:58] It is the direct appropriation of another person's ideas, data, or work product without acknowledging their contribution. Which happens all the time, sadly. It does. And a 2025 study by Zweig and colleagues looked at over 1,500 participants to really tease out how this differs from general bad behavior. They found that knowledge theft has a very specific devastating consequence. What's that? When people experience it, it fundamentally alters their future behavior.

[00:09:27] It teaches the victim to preemptively hide their own knowledge from that point forward. So, if we are in a brainstorm, right? And I pitch a rough concept for a new ad campaign. And you immediately jump in, polish it slightly, and pitch it to the boss as your own brilliant realization. Which happens so fast sometimes. Yeah, exactly. So, my immediate biological and professional response is to just never speak up in a brainstorm ever again. Your brain learns that sharing ideas results in a loss of status and reward.

[00:09:57] So, you respond to the theft with defensive silence. That makes total sense. You begin to shut down. Right. You begin to hoard your best ideas, waiting for a moment when you can launch them independently without anyone else in the room to intercept them. And this kills the collaborative process instantly. Wow. Yeah. A researcher named Hershkovitz did a massive review in 2011 of all these overlapping concepts. So, workplace bullying, incivility, undermining, knowledge hiding.

[00:10:25] She synthesized all this data and found that no matter what academic label you slap on the behavior, the organizational outcome is exactly the same. Which is what? It makes collaboration incredibly risky for the individual. Basically, the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. The risk of being stabbed in the back just completely outweighs the potential reward of a successful group project. And to understand the root of why this happens, we have to go all the way back to a foundational 1949 social psychology theory by Morton Deutsch. 1949.

[00:10:55] That's going way back. It is, but it holds up perfectly. He proposed a framework for understanding cooperation versus competition. Deutsch argued that when people's goals are positively linked, meaning my progress inherently helps you progress and we can only cross the finish line together. We naturally cooperate. Yes. We share information and support each other.

[00:11:16] But when goals are negatively linked, where my progress inherently comes at your expense or there is only one prize and we both want it, we naturally compete. We withhold information and we obstruct each other. That feels like a massive light bulb moment for anyone listening. Like this is the moment to look critically at your own team's dynamics and the actual structure of your workplace. Definitely. Ask yourself how things are actually set up. Right.

[00:11:44] Are your goals positively or negatively linked with the person sitting next to you? Does your success actually require them to fail? Because if we have clearly defined what undermining looks like, you know, the slow leak of the tire, the stolen credit, the hidden knowledge. Right. All of that. And we know it is deeply tied to this concept of negatively linked goals. We really have to ask the big question. Why are goals suddenly feeling so incredibly negatively linked right now?

[00:12:12] Like why is everyone acting like the pie is shrinking in 2026? To answer the why, we really have to zoom out and look at the macroeconomic context provided in Dr. Westover's paper. You simply cannot separate individual office behavior from the broader economy. People bring their outside stress to work. Exactly. People bring the anxieties of the world right into the cubicle with them. Let's look at the data from just October 2026.

[00:12:38] In that single month, U.S. employers announced over 617,000 job cuts. That is a staggering number for a single month. I mean, that's entire city's worth of livelihoods just vanishing. It is. And here is a truly modern twist to that statistic. Artificial intelligence was explicitly cited as the primary reason in about one in five of those cuts. Oh, wow. Yeah.

[00:13:03] That is over 121,000 jobs lost directly to AI implementation in 30 days. At the same time, the share of consumers telling pollsters they expect unemployment to rise hit its highest level since the height of the pandemic disruptions in April 2020. So people are deeply fundamentally spooked. They are. And consequently, Gallup reported that employee engagement has plummeted to an abysmal 29%. Let's just sit with that 29% for a second.

[00:13:31] That means seven out of 10 people sitting in your office are basically just physically present but mentally checked out or actively miserable and plotting their exit. Exactly. They're just going through the motions to collect a paycheck. But their discretionary effort is at absolute zero. And that profound economic fear trickles directly down into how we treat each other on a Tuesday morning. I mean, the resume builder data backs this up perfectly.

[00:13:57] When survey respondents were asked to confidentially explain why they undermined a colleague, 37% explicitly admitted they did it to protect their own jobs. Which is just a survival instinct kicking in. Totally. And 35% said they would be highly likely to call out a co-worker's mistake to management if layoffs were looming. Right. They are viewing their co-workers not as teammates but as the alternative to their own unemployment.

[00:14:23] This macroeconomic fear activates the four distinct drivers of undermining that the research identifies. Okay, let's walk through those. The first, as you just highlighted, is job insecurity. The fear of losing your livelihood triggers a primal job preservation motivation. When humans feel their survival is threatened, they react. Fight or flight, basically. Yes. Some people respond to this threat by working harder, putting in longer hours, and trying to prove their immense value. But others respond by trying to tear down the people around them.

[00:14:53] Because it's easier. Exactly. They realize it is often easier to make a peer look incompetent than it is to make themselves look exceptional. If I can lower the average performance of the team, my mediocre performance suddenly looks like the gold standard. It's the old joke about running away from a bear, right? Like, I don't need to run faster than the bear. I just need to run faster than you. That is unfortunately very accurate. If layoffs are the bear, undermining is literally tripping your co-worker so the bear eats them instead of you.

[00:15:21] That is exactly the psychological mechanism at play here. And it feeds directly into the second driver, which is zero-sum construal. Zero-sum construal. Yes. Researchers Sharola and Pateza demonstrated through multiple studies that economic downturns actively promote the cognitive belief that one person's gain is inherently another person's loss. It is a perceptual shift in how you view resources. Okay. So how does that work in practice?

[00:15:50] Well, in a booming economy, people tend to believe the pie is expanding. Like, if you get a raise, I might get one next quarter. But when the economy tightens, people perceive the pie is fixed or shrinking. Right. There's only so much to go around. Exactly. So in a zero-sum mindset, helping you finish your project feels like giving away my own slice of the pie. Any advantage you gain is perceived as a direct threat to my security. Okay.

[00:16:19] Here is where I kind of have to push back a little bit on the researcher's framing. Go for it. Because if my company uses a forced curve for bonuses or promotions, which actually brings us to the third driver, relative evaluation, isn't it mathematically irrational for me to help my coworker? That is a very valid point. Right. Let's say my department mandates that only the top 10% get a bonus and the bottom 10% are put on a performance improvement plan.

[00:16:42] If I help my coworker polish their presentation, they look better, they move up the curve, which mathematically pushes me down the curve. You're not wrong. So if I help them, I literally lose money. I might even lose my job. So why do we sit here and call this bad behavior or a dark art or toxic when it's really just employees logically and mathematically following the rules of the game the company designed? This is perhaps the most crucial point in the entire deep dive. You are hitting on the exact paradox the research highlights.

[00:17:11] It is not a character flaw. It is a perfectly rational economic response to a poorly designed incentive structure. Because the game is rigged. Exactly. And economists have modeled this dynamic for decades. Edward Lazare in 1989 argued that rewarding people based on relative comparisons, so grading on a curve, inevitably creates incentives for employees to sabotage their peers. Because you can't all win. Right. Because there are two ways to win a tournament.

[00:17:40] Elevate your own performance or sabotage the performance of your competitors. And sabotaging someone else is often way less calorie intensive than innovating a new product yourself. Precisely. But the most striking mathematical proof of this comes from an economist named Chen in 2003. Chen built a complex mathematical model of winner-take-all promotion tournaments, which is exactly what a forced curve or a one-promotion spot available scenario is. Okay. What did the math show?

[00:18:08] Chen mathematically proved that the most capable, highly able candidate, basically the absolute superstar of the team, actually attracts the most sabotage from their peers. Wait. Walk me through the mechanics of that. Why does the superstar attract the sabotage? Think about it as a game theory scenario, right? Imagine a team of five people. Four of them are average performers and one is an absolute genius who works tirelessly. Okay. I'm picturing it.

[00:18:34] The four average performers look at the genius and realize they cannot possibly beat them on merit. Working harder won't close the gap. The only rational, mathematical choice available to the average performers if they want the promotion is to lower the genius's output. Oh, man. So they team up against the top dog? Yes. So they begin a coordinated, often unspoken campaign of undermining. They conveniently forget to invite the superstar to crucial strategy meetings.

[00:19:01] They delay sending them necessary data until the absolute last minute. Or they talk behind their back? Exactly. They casually plant seeds of doubt about the superstar's soft skills to the manager. Wow. So if I am genuinely the top performer, delivering the most value to the company, I instantly get a massive target painted on my back by everyone else on the curve? You become the primary obstacle to everyone else's survival.

[00:19:24] And the terrifying conclusion of Chen's model is that because the most capable candidate absorbs so much incoming sabotage from multiple directions, they have to spend 40% of their energy just repairing the damage. Just playing defense. Right. Hunting down missing files, defending their reputation, and consequently their actual performance drops. Because they're exhausted. Yes. It drops so much that they fall behind the person who is the best at orchestrating the sabotage.

[00:19:51] Meaning the company looks at the final metrics, sees the superstar struggling, and accidentally promotes the best saboteur rather than the best worker. That is mind-bending. Yes. The organization's design literally selects for political warfare skills instead of actual competence and innovation. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of toxicity. Because the company thinks they are promoting the person who delivered the best results, but they are actually promoting the person who was most ruthless at destroying the results of others.

[00:20:20] And then that saboteur becomes a manager and the cycle just perpetuates. It absolutely perpetuates. And when you combine that ruthless mathematical reality with the fourth driver, envy in permissive norms, you get an absolute disaster. Let's talk about the envy part. So Duffy's research dives deep into how envy leads to undermining through a psychological process called moral disengagement. Explain moral disengagement.

[00:20:46] Like what does that actually look like in a person's head when they are deciding to do something they know is wrong? Moral disengagement is the cognitive gymnastics a person performs to convince themselves that they are still a good person while doing something objectively bad. Most people don't view themselves as villains. Right. Everyone is the hero of their own story. Exactly. So when they feel envious of a high performer and they decide to, say, hide an important email from them, their brain has to resolve that dissonance.

[00:21:15] They tell themselves a story. Like, well, the system is rigged and cutthroat anyway. The company doesn't care about us. I have a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. So really, I'm just protecting my family. Yes. Or they say, plus, that superstar is arrogant and deserves to be taken down a peg. They rewrite the narrative so the bad behavior is justified as a necessary survival tactic in a hostile environment. And if leadership turns a blind eye to these behaviors. Then it signals permissive norms.

[00:21:42] It tells everyone that moral disengagement is the unofficial company policy. And what makes this so much more terrifying today, you know, than when these studies were done back in 2003 or 2011, is that the tools for sabotage and self-preservation are getting so much more advanced and invisible. You're talking about AI. Yes. The deep dive into the April 2026 data point about AI use is just mind-blowing.

[00:22:06] The source notes that over 60% of workers who were anxious about layoffs secretly used AI tools to absorb their coworkers' tasks without even telling management. It's staggering. And that number jumped to over 74% in layoff-heavy companies. This is a completely new frontier of workplace competition. It is the quiet, automated absorption of work. Let's really explore how this happens in practice because it's not someone overtly walking into a boss's office and saying, hey, fire Sarah. I'm taking her account. No, it's never that obvious.

[00:22:35] It's so much more subtle. Someone on the team offers to, like, help out a colleague who is overwhelmed. They take on a portion of the portfolio, but instead of doing the work manually, they feed it into a highly advanced language model or an automated workflow. And they finish it instantly. Right. They do eight hours of Sarah's work in 12 minutes, but they don't submit it in 12 minutes. They wait. They schedule the emails to go out at normal intervals. So they look like they are working normally. Exactly. To management.

[00:23:04] This person suddenly looks like a hyperproductive superhuman, a 10x employee who can handle double the workload without breaking a sweat. And suddenly, Sarah looks incredibly slow, inefficient, and entirely redundant. It is a profound shift in the mechanics of threat. Historically, undermining meant making someone else look bad. Now, thanks to AI, undermining can simply mean making yourself look unnaturally good by secretly automating the workload of your peers. It's wild.

[00:23:34] And the data shows that nearly 63% of the people doing this never told their managers how much of the work the AI was actually doing. They pass the machine's output off as their own individual brilliance. Which is a huge deception. It is. They are building a moat around their own employment by secretly outsourcing their peers' jobs to an algorithm they control. But the risk to the company is astronomical. I mean, what if the AI hallucinates data in a financial report and nobody knows the AI even wrote the report?

[00:24:04] That's the real danger. Right. The employee who automated it doesn't understand the complex math. The colleague who used to do it has been laid off. And the manager thinks the work was done by a human. It's a ticking time bomb. It is a massive vulnerability. So we've established that the forced curve system encourages sabotage. The economic climate demands self-preservation. And the AI tools to execute these strategies are more powerful and harder to detect than ever. The individual employee is basically acting rationally within a broken system. Exactly.

[00:24:33] But we have to pivot and ask, what is the actual bottom line price the organization pays for designing and maintaining this zero-sum game? Yes. Let's look at the organizational fallout. Because if I am an executive listening to this, maybe I have a bit of a traditional mindset. Maybe I'm thinking, look, I want them hungry. A little fierce competition keeps people sharp. Iron sharpens iron, right? Right. We only want the apex predators on this team.

[00:24:59] It's easy to romanticize the cutthroat environment as a driver of excellence. But the costs outlined in this research are absolutely devastating. They really are. Let's start with how information actually moves, or rather fails to move through a company. The paper introduces this brilliant concept called the reciprocal distrust loop from a 2014 study by Schoen and colleagues. The reciprocal distrust loop completely debunks the iron sharpens iron myth.

[00:25:26] Schoen's team tracked knowledge hiding in organizations and found a fascinating boomerang effect. A boomerang effect? Yeah. When you hide knowledge from a colleague to maintain an advantage, it doesn't just hurt the person you are hiding it from. It actually ruins the hider's own creativity and long-term viability. Wait, how does hiding something hurt the person who hides it? They still have the information.

[00:25:51] Because human beings are highly perceptive social creatures, your peers are not oblivious. Even if they can't explicitly prove you hid the data, they sense the friction. They know something is off. Right. They recognize that you are hoarding information, being evasive or playing dumb. And the moment they sense that, they silently agree to stop sharing anything with you in return. You become socially and intellectually quarantined.

[00:26:17] Okay, I want to lean into an analogy here because this is exactly like a corporate version of the tragedy of the commons. Oh, I like that. Imagine a village where everyone brings their sheep to graze in the center square, right? If I secretly bring twice as many sheep at night to get my flock fatter, I win in the short term. But soon, everyone notices my fat sheep. They all start bringing extra sheep at night. The grass is completely destroyed and all the sheep starve. That's a perfect way to picture it. In the office, it looks like this.

[00:26:47] I hoard my client data because I want to look indispensable to the boss. I want to be the only one who knows how to fix a specific problem. But by doing so, I train everyone else on my team that hoarding data is the culture. So everyone starts doing it. Exactly. So the marketing team hides their analytics from the sales team. The sales team hides customer feedback from product development. And product development hides timeline delays from marketing. It just snowballs.

[00:27:12] Suddenly, instead of a connected network of collective intelligence, we are all just sitting on these isolated, heavily defended islands of useless, fragmented information. That is a perfect extension of the metaphor. The person who hoards information to look indispensable gradually loses access to the continuous flow of new information that would actually keep them indispensable. Right. Because the world moves on. Exactly. The world moves on and their hidden knowledge becomes obsolete. But no one warns them.

[00:27:41] And the organizational cost doesn't stop at the stagnation of knowledge flow. It hits actual, measurable output and productivity. Let's talk about the output drop. So Carpenter and colleagues conducted research in 2010 looking at tournament conditions. Basically environments where there's a clear winner and losers and where office politics and sabotage are possible. They found that in these environments, overall team output actually falls compared to collaborative environments. But if the prize is bigger, shouldn't they work harder? You would think so.

[00:28:11] But the research shows people proactively reduce their effort. They anticipate that they will be sabotaged. Oh, wow. If you are an employee in a toxic tournament system, you ask yourself, why should I work a 60-hour week to put together a brilliant, innovative proposal if I know with near certainty that my colleague is just going to mysteriously lose the file? Or publicly poke holes in it during the pitch. Right. Or claim credit for the best parts when the VP's in the room.

[00:28:38] So you basically calculate the return on investment of your own effort and realize it's negative. It completely kills discretionary effort. People just do the bare minimum to not get fired because trying to be exceptional just makes you a target. Exactly. But it gets even darker and more urgent when you move out of a corporate office setting where the stakes are just bonuses and quarterly profits and into an environment like a hospital or an airline. Because then the stakes are literal human safety.

[00:29:05] Yes. The stakes aren't just market share anymore. It's safety. The source brings in chilling data from the Joint Commission in 2021 regarding health care environments. And what did they find? They found that 40 percent of clinicians reported that they stay silent rather than question a known intimidator. Let's really pause on that. 40 percent.

[00:29:30] Almost half of the medical professionals in this survey would rather stay quiet than confront a bully. That leads directly to life-altering medical errors. It guarantees them. Imagine this scenario. An attending surgeon is known throughout the hospital to be a vicious, undermining saboteur. A brilliant jerk who ruins the careers of anyone who crosses them. Okay.

[00:29:56] A junior nurse is prepping a patient and notices a discrepancy in the chart. They realize the surgeon is about to operate on the wrong knee. If the environment is collaborative, the nurse speaks up immediately. Obviously. But in a toxic environment, the nurse has to weigh the patient's safety against the absolute certainty that the surgeon will publicly humiliate them, sabotage their upcoming performance review, and potentially get them fired for insubordination. That is terrifying.

[00:30:25] The nurse hesitates. And in that hesitation, a tragedy occurs. Because the system has made truth-telling too personally costly. Undermining and intimidation share a core mechanism, right? They punish the very communication that organizations need to survive. Yes. And we really have to talk about the emotional toll on the individuals trapped in this, because it's not just a business inefficiency. It is a human crisis. The human cost is profound.

[00:30:53] Meta-analyses, specifically large-scale reviews by Hirschkovis and Barling, looked at the health outcomes of workplace aggression. They found something that really challenges our traditional view of office dynamics. What was that? Aggression from coworkers is just as harmful to an employee's physical health, mental well-being, and job attitudes as aggression from a supervisor. Really? Because we tend to think abuse only flows downhill, right? From a bad boss to a subordinate.

[00:31:22] We expect power dynamics to be vertical. But it turns out horizontal aggression, the slow-leak sabotage from the person sitting in the cubicle right next to you, is equally destructive to your nervous system. I guess because there's no escape. You expect a boss to judge you, but you expect a peer to be in the trenches with you. When the peer turns out to be the sniper, it's a profound betrayal. It absolutely is. And the paper points out that knowledge theft, like stealing credit, creates a very specific emotional signature.

[00:31:51] It's not just annoyance. It creates a deep sense of loss and anger for the victim. It feels like a violation of identity because your ideas are an extension of your intellect. It is a deeply personal violation. And to fully understand why this environment becomes so intolerable that people quit or simply shut down, we need to unpack the dual stressors at play that the research identifies. Okay. Dual stressors. Yes. It divides job insecurity into two types. Affective job insecurity is the emotional dread, the knots in your stomach,

[00:32:20] the anxiety keeping you awake at 2 a.m., worrying about how you will pay the mortgage if the AI takes your department. Right. The feeling of fear. Then there is cognitive job insecurity, which is the logical, rational perception that the threat exists, like looking at the balance sheet and realizing the company is struggling. The facts on the ground. Exactly. When you combine those two massive internal stressors with the external reality of workplace undermining from peers, it creates an inescapably toxic cocktail.

[00:32:48] Because the employee realizes on a very stark level that the company will not protect them from layoffs. True. And their peers will not protect them from sabotage. Therefore, they are entirely on their own. Total isolation. They must protect themselves at all costs. The psychological contract of employment is completely broken at that point. And when that contract breaks, it takes years to rebuild, if ever. Okay, so we have thoroughly diagnosed the disease here. We have looked into the darkest corners of this issue. The environment is zero-sum.

[00:33:17] The incentives mathematically reward backstabbing. The emotional toll is massive. People are hiding behind AI and productivity is actively tanking. It's a grim picture. It is. The listener really needs a cure now. If I am a director, a VP, or even just a team lead listening to this, and I realize with horror that my team is stuck in this reciprocal distress loop, how do I actually fix this? We have to move to the solutions. Let's move into the playbook provided by the research.

[00:33:46] The first evidence-based response from Dr. Westover's paper focuses entirely on rewiring rewards and making credit undeniably visible. That's the foundation. Let's start with the evaluation side, because we've hammered on the math of the tournament. We have to kill the forced distribution curve, don't we? It is the absolute first step. If you want cooperation, you cannot mandate that a certain percentage of your workforce must be mathematically labeled as losers every single year,

[00:34:15] regardless of their actual performance. It just breeds conflict. The Microsoft case study is the classic textbook example here. For years, under Steve Ballmer, they used stack ranking. This forced managers to grade on a curve, rating a fixed share of their staff as underperformers who were then eligible for termination. Even if everyone on the team was doing stellar work. Exactly. By 2012, reports were emerging that employees considered this the single most destructive process in the company.

[00:34:43] I totally remember reading extensive reporting on this era of Microsoft. You'd have a manager hire five absolute prodigies, like the best engineers in the world. They would build an incredible product. But come review time, the math of the stack rank dictated that one of those geniuses had to be thrown to the wolves and labeled inadequate. Just because of the quota. Right. It pushed Microsoft employees to compete fiercely with each other, holding back features and hiding bugs from other internal teams, rather than competing with Apple or Google.

[00:35:13] They were basically cannibalizing their own talent pool. And in 2013, under new leadership, Microsoft explicitly ended stack ranking to focus on teamwork and employee growth. Good move. Now, it's worth noting the paper mentions a caveat here. Microsoft drifted back toward performance-based dismissals and impact designators around 2025. Oh, interesting. They backslid. Yes. And this reveals something crucial for leaders. These relative evaluation habits are deeply ingrained in corporate DNA.

[00:35:43] Management naturally gravitates back toward them because they seem like an easy way to measure complex human output. It takes constant vigilance to keep them out. So what's the alternative then? Contrast that old Microsoft model with the software company Atlassian. Atlassian recognized the danger and instituted a three-pronged review system. Employees are not just rated on what they built. They are rated equally on three distinct pillars. Which are?

[00:36:11] Role expectations, contribution to the team, and alignment with company values. Oh, I want to highlight that. That contribution to the team is actually weighted equally in the compensation equation. It's not just a soft skill discussed at the end of the review. It is hard math. If you do not help others, you do not get the top tier reward. And Atlassian explicitly designed this so that a brilliant jerk, you know, somebody with like sky-high individual output,

[00:36:39] but kind of destroys the morale and everybody's productivity around them, that person mathematically cannot receive a top rating. That is brilliant. Their toxic behavior drags down the team contribution score, neutralizing their individual output. And look at an entirely different industry. Nucor. Massive player in the steel industry. How do they handle it? They pay most of their production employees a weekly bonus based solely on the quality output of their work team as a whole.

[00:37:08] And there is no cap on that bonus. So if my teammate struggles, the line slows down and my paycheck physically shrinks. But if I rush over and teach them a better technique, the line speeds up and my paycheck grows. Exactly. When a teammate's competence directly raises your own paycheck, the incentive to hide knowledge vanishes. The incentive to train and support them is literally built into the system architecture. Change the math. Change the behavior. Okay, so redesigning the bonus structure makes total sense.

[00:37:37] But what about the day-to-day issue of credit? Because even on a highly functional, well-paid team, people still argue about who really drove the success of a project. Oh, always. The paper talks about making credit visible, but it brings up this fascinating psychological quirk. The psychology of overclaiming. Schroeder's research shows that if you ask a group of people who just finished a collaborative project what percentage of the final outcome they were personally responsible for,

[00:38:04] and you add up their answers, the total routinely comes out to way more than 100%. It is a universal human phenomenon known as egocentric bias. It doesn't necessarily mean your team is composed of narcissists. It's just how the brain processes memory. Because we only see what we do. Right. Because you are trapped inside your own head, you remember every single email you sent, every hour you stayed late at the office, every scrapped idea you pitched. You feel the weight of your own effort.

[00:38:33] But you don't feel theirs. Exactly. You only see a tiny fraction of the work your colleagues do when they are at their desks or are working from home. So everyone naturally overestimates their own contribution relative to others. I use an analogy for this all the time. It's like a massive neighborhood potluck dinner. Oh, this is good. Everyone secretly thinks they brought the best, most labor-intensive dish. Because you know exactly how many grocery stores you had to visit to find the right cheese and how long you stood over the stove stirring the roux for your casserole.

[00:39:03] You felt that effort. You know the struggle. Right. But when you look at the potato salad someone else brought, you just assume they bought it at the deli on the way over. You diminish their invisible labor because you didn't experience it. That is so true. But if everyone naturally overestimates their own work because of this deep-seated biological bias, how do you as a leader actually fix that without micromanaging every single keystroke of a project? Well, if we run with your potluck analogy,

[00:39:30] the fix isn't to walk around telling people their casserole isn't actually that good. That just breeds resentment. Yeah, nobody wants to hear that. The psychological intervention discovered by Schroeder's research is surprisingly simple but incredibly effective at breaking the bias. They found that you can drastically reduce this over-claiming simply by prompting people to state what others contributed before they are allowed to claim their own credit. So basically forcing them to stand at the potluck table

[00:39:57] and explicitly compliment the potato salad before they are allowed to serve their own dish? Precisely. Just making an employee consciously retrieve the memory of their teammates' work recalibrates their perspective. It forces the brain to acknowledge the invisible labor. It grounds them. Yes. Before you write your self-evaluation explaining why you deserve the promotion, the form requires you to detail exactly what Sarah and Dave did to make the project succeed. It instantly grounds them in reality.

[00:40:26] That is a brilliant zero-cost intervention. Every manager listening could implement that in their one-on-ones tomorrow. You also have to make the work visible from the very beginning of the process. The paper highlights the famous Pixar model, Ed Catmull's brain trust. Oh, I've heard of this. At Pixar, they realize that if directors wait until a movie is almost finished to show it to the studio, they become incredibly defensive of their work, and arguments over who contributed what become intense. Because they've been isolated with it. Right.

[00:40:55] So Pixar forces the open sharing of unfinished, ugly, work-in-progress storyboards early and often. When you share early, attribution is natural. Everyone in the room sees the idea evolve in real time. It creates a public paper trail of the evolution. Yes. It completely prevents those bitter arguments at the end of a project over who actually came up with the core concept, because the whole room witnessed the conception. But what happens when the preventative measures fall?

[00:41:21] Because despite the brain trust, despite the prompts, the theft still happens sometimes. Someone just blatantly steals the credit for your idea in a high-stakes meeting with the VP. This is a make-or-break moment for leadership culture. Swag's research into knowledge theft found that the profound anger and defensive silence victims feel subsides significantly when leaders or colleagues publicly affirm who rightfully owned the idea. Publicly affirm it. Yes. And here is the kicker, the most important takeaway for any manager.

[00:41:52] A leader who stays silent when they see credit being stolen is not being neutral. They are actively endorsing the theft. Wow. Affirming the rightful owner publicly is a required leadership duty to repair the cultural damage. Pulling the victim aside later for a private apology, like, hey, I know that was really your idea, sorry Dave took the credit, that does not change the public record. Because Dave still got the public win. Exactly. The saboteur still got the public win.

[00:42:20] The leader must correct it in the room. Silence is endorsement. Yeah. That's a heavy, heavy takeaway. It requires immense managerial courage to stop a meeting and say, actually, you know, Dave, I believe Sarah pitched that framework last week. Sarah, you know, can you expand on your original thought? It takes guts, but it's necessary. Okay. So fixing the pay incentives and fiercely guarding credit are huge steps.

[00:42:45] But the paper argues that this isn't enough if the overarching structure of the company still feels dangerous or unfair. Right. Let's move into the next phase of the playbook. Fairness, norms, and trust systems. How do leaders install the structural guardrails to make cooperation feel safe on a daily basis? It starts with the concept of procedural fairness. Yes. Bruckner's foundational research from 1994 showed a fascinating psychological dynamic about how humans process layoffs and threat.

[00:43:15] What did he find? When the procedures for workforce decisions are perceived as transparent and fair, people can handle negative outcomes relatively well. Surprisingly, fair procedures matter almost as much and sometimes more than the actual outcome itself. So even if the news is bad, like even if bonuses are cut or layoffs happen, if I feel the process was logical and fair, I won't necessarily resort to undermining my peers to survive. Exactly.

[00:43:45] It prevents the panic response. Let's contrast two vastly different examples from the source material. So, Nucor, the steel company we discussed earlier, historically handled economic downturns not by immediately firing the bottom 10 percent, but by reducing production days for everyone across the board. So, everyone takes a small hit. Yes. Furthermore, executive pay automatically fell in tandem with company performance. They shared the pain. The process signaled collective sacrifice.

[00:44:15] The leaders took the hit alongside the floor workers. It maintains the positively linked goals even in a crisis. We all bleed together so we all survive together. Now, contrast that collective approach with Meta's approach in January 2025. Mark Zuckerberg publicly announced they would need to cut about 5 percent of their massive staff. But crucially, he explicitly labeled the targeted group as low performers in his communications. Oh, wow.

[00:44:44] Yeah, if I am sitting in a cubicle at Meta in January 2025, that announcement is a recipe for absolute Machiavellian paranoia. It instantly ignited a firestorm of fear and distrust across the organization. Because when you label departing employees as low performers, you invite every surviving employee to scramble frantically to make sure someone else looks worse than they do. Because nobody wants that label. Right.

[00:45:09] It turns every colleague into a potential bottom dweller you can step on to keep your own head above water. You have to reduce unnecessary threat through transparent, collective criteria, not peer-relative layoff rules that pit survivors against each other. And beyond layoffs, what about enforcing daily conduct norms? Because I have worked at places with lovely laminated core values on the wall. You know, respect, integrity, teamwork. We all have.

[00:45:35] But the top salesperson was a complete monster who screamed at junior staff and got away with it because they brought in millions of dollars. Tolerating the high-performing monster is the ultimate test of a company's true values. You have to fire the brilliant jerks. You just have to let them go. The source highlights Uber's massive culture rewrite in 2017 as a prime example of this reckoning.

[00:45:57] Following a devastating investigation into their toxic culture by former Attorney General Eric Holder, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had to publicly scrap their original hyper-aggressive corporate values. Yeah, I remember that. Freezes like toe-stepping and always be hustling were literally written into the company DNA. But they had to be removed because those phrases were being weaponized by high performers to excuse terrible, undermining behavior. It was basically a license to be awful. Exactly.

[00:46:27] Netflix is another prime example. Their famous culture memo explicitly states there is no place in the company for people who do not treat colleagues with decency, no matter how brilliant or productive they are. They literally coined the term brilliant jerks to publicly state they won't keep them. And the data supports the idea that firing one brilliant jerk can fix an entire department, right? It's not usually a case of everyone acting terribly. It's a concentrated few infecting the rest. The data on this is incredibly clear.

[00:46:55] Look at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center's CORS system, the Coworker Observation Reporting System. It is a highly structured, non-punitive system for peer reporting unprofessional behavior among doctors. How does it work? They tracked this data over a four-year period. They found that while about 9% of physicians received a report for a single instance of bad behavior, less than 1% accounted for repeated systemic problems. Less than 1%. Yes.

[00:47:25] A tiny, tiny fraction of the workforce causes the vast majority of the cultural damage. But if you do not have a robust system to identify, counsel, and eventually remove that 1%, their behavior normalizes toxicity. It infects the whole culture. It's the one bad apple spoiling the bunch. Exactly. And that leads right into the necessity of building actual trust-based systems, not just relying on good vibes. Structure is key.

[00:47:51] The paper talks about Toyota's famous Andon Cord on their assembly lines. Yes, the famous Andon Cord. Anybody from a senior engineer to a day-one line worker can physically pull a cord to stop the entire production line if they see a defect. And they are expected to do it without fear of blame. The cultural focus is entirely on fixing the structural problem, not punishing the person who found it. Right.

[00:48:15] And Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle adapted this exact same manufacturing concept to healthcare with their patient safety alerts. Right. Focusing on the system, not the person. Exactly. They focused heavily on system failure, not individual fault, even in severe cases involving patient harm. Let's really connect the dots here.

[00:48:34] If a massive hospital can create a system where a junior 22-year-old nurse feels completely safe hitting the brakes and stopping a complex surgical procedure because they spot a process error without any fear of the head surgeon destroying their career, then a marketing firm has zero excuse for why a junior copywriter can't safely point out a fatal flaw in a social media campaign without getting fired. That is the exact takeaway. It is entirely possible to engineer psychological safety, even in high-stakes environments.

[00:49:03] It is a choice leadership makes. But it takes work. It does. But the research offers a massive warning here. You cannot just buy a software solution to fix a culture of fear. Serenco and Bontis conducted deep research on knowledge hiding. They found that a company buying a new, incredibly expensive, state-of-the-art knowledge-sharing software platform does absolutely nothing to increase collaboration if the culture is fundamentally broken. Because tools don't change behavior. Exactly. Tools do not create sharing.

[00:49:32] Psychological safety creates sharing. Because if I don't trust you, and I think you are going to use my data to get me fired, I am just going to upload useless, sanitized, generic documents to the shiny new company Wiki to meet my quota. Right. In which it's compliance. And I will keep the real valuable insights hidden on my private hard drive. Precisely. The technology is irrelevant if the sociology is broken. You have to separate system failure from individual fault. Look at the cautionary tale of Wells Fargo, which the source discusses at length.

[00:50:01] Oh, that was a mess. They created an intense pressure cooker environment. The sales goals for opening new accounts were so aggressively unrealistic, and the daily managerial pressure was so extreme that trust was completely obliterated. People were desperate. Employees felt they had no choice. It led to widespread fraudulent accounts being opened, and eventually 5,300 firings for sales violations. When systemic pressure overwhelms psychological trust, ordinary people will rationalize behaviors that are normally unthinkable.

[00:50:32] Okay, so to wrap up this playbook, we have to look at the long game. Because implementing a new Atlassian-style review system, or changing the bonus structure to match Nucor, or firing the brilliant jerk, those things take time and political capital. They don't happen overnight. And maintaining them during an era of constant AI restructuring and economic anxiety is even harder. How do we future-proof this culture once we build it? The final section of the paper talks about long-term capabilities. The first one is promoting multipliers.

[00:51:01] A multiplier is a specific type of leader. It is someone who doesn't just do great work themselves, but actually enhances the intelligence, capability, and confidence of the people around them. They raise the tide. Yes, they make the whole room smarter. The research tells us that a demonstrated history of contribution to others must be a non-negotiable prerequisite for promotion to leadership. It cannot just be a nice-to-have tiebreaker between two high-performing candidates. It has to be the core metric. Think about the signal you send to your entire workforce.

[00:51:31] If you promote a high-performing saboteur, the brilliant jerk who crushes their quota but leaves a trail of burnout colleagues in their wake, you have just taught the entire company what the real rules are. Right. The laminated core values on the wall mean absolutely nothing. The promotion is the truth. That phrase should be on a billboard. The promotion is the truth. It broadcasts the actual undeniable culture of the company louder than any CEO town hall speech or HR memo ever could.

[00:52:00] If you promote the backstabber, you are demanding backstabbing. You're guaranteeing it. And the second long-term capability is changing what we measure. We have to stop relying on these vague annual engagement surveys, right? Yes. Traditional engagement surveys are often far too high-level and abstract to catch the insidious nature of undermining. They ask if you feel connected to the mission. Which is pretty useless.

[00:52:26] It is. You need to measure the actual social climate and specific microbehaviors. You need to survey employees with highly targeted questions. Can you actually get the information you need from your colleagues to hit your deadlines? Very specific. Is credit being attributed fairly in your weekly meetings? Is it genuinely safe to admit a mistake to your manager without being financially penalized? You need to actively measure the friction in the system. Because if you can't measure the knowledge hiding, you can't fix it.

[00:52:56] It just remains a ghost in the machine. And finally, the research points to renewing the employment relationship. This seems more crucial right now than ever given all the AI anxiety and layoff fears we discussed earlier. It is the bedrock foundation of everything else. The deepest driver of this zero-sum backstabbing behavior is a broken sense of mutual obligation between employer and employee. If they don't feel loyal to you, they won't be loyal to each other.

[00:53:25] Exactly. If employees feel the company views them as disposable and will drop them at a moment's notice to save a dollar, they will logically only look out for themselves. Leaders need to be radically honest about uncertainty. You can't promise a job for life anymore. The economy changes too fast. So what can you promise? You can invest heavily in your employees' overall employability. You train them. You upskill them in the new AI tools.

[00:53:52] You make sure that even if their current specific role is eliminated by automation, their survival doesn't hinge entirely on this one job because they are highly skilled and adaptable. You make them resilient. When you increase their overall security in the broader labor market, they don't feel the desperate need to violently protect their tiny piece of turf in your office. I absolutely love that reframing. It's not about promising them a desk forever. It's about promising them that while they are here, you will make them more valuable to the world.

[00:54:21] Ask yourself, listening right now, evaluate the leaders above you. That's an important question. Are they multipliers who build your capacity or are they brilliant jerks who just managed to survive a brutal corporate tournament and are now forcing you to play the exact same miserable game? It's something everyone needs to think about. Let's bring this all together for a quick high energy recap.

[00:54:42] What we've learned today from this incredible deep dive into the research is that workplace undermining, credit stealing and knowledge hiding, they are rarely the result of psychopathic coworkers who just enjoy being evil. No, it's usually just ordinary people. Right. They are a completely rational, mathematically predictable response to a badly designed zero-sum environment. When people feel threatened by layoffs, AI or forced curves, they protect themselves. It's survival.

[00:55:10] To fix it, leaders have to fundamentally change the game. You have to kill the forced distribution curve. You have to make credit visible, acknowledge invisible labor and publicly correct the record in the room when ideas are stolen. You have to speak up. You have to share the pain during downturns fairly. You have to fire the brilliant jerks. And most importantly, you have to build systems where raising a red flag doesn't get your head cut off.

[00:55:36] And as we close this deep dive, I want to leave you with one final, slightly uncomfortable thought to mull over. Let's hear it. We have spent this entire deep dive looking at how to protect yourself and your team from external threats. You know, the people out there who hide knowledge or steal your credit. But if the research on human egocentric bias tells us that we all naturally overestimate our own contributions and underestimate the work of others. Oh, I see where this is going.

[00:56:04] What if the person inadvertently hoarding information or quietly rationalizing why you shouldn't help a struggling colleague today is actually you? How much of your current professional success relies on a zero-sum game you didn't even realize you were playing? Man, that changes the whole picture. It forces you to look in the mirror before you look at the team. Are you the collaborator or are you the leak in the tire? Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. Take these insights back to your own teams.

[00:56:34] Look at the reality of your meeting rooms and start rewriting the rules.