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The most damaging thing in a work environment is a manager who doesn’t intervene with a toxic employee.

It’s tempting to assume incompetent leadership is the worst thing a workplace can suffer. But incompetence tends to produce inefficiency — missed targets, poor decisions, wasted resources. A tolerated toxic employee produces something worse: a values statement. It tells everyone watching what the organization will actually put up with, regardless of what its stated culture claims. The impact of a toxic colleague affects everything: motivation, engagement, quality, teamwork, commitment, and the wellbeing of employees within the toxic employee’s sphere. In fact, an unaccountable, toxic employee causes others to actively disengage—to check out while building resentment.

Why might a manager allow a toxic employee to sow destruction without intervening? Some might claim they aren’t or weren’t aware, but that is usually a specious claim. More often, they’re afraid of the person (who might also be a top performer nobody wants to lose, someone politically connected, someone prone to retaliation) or they genuinely don’t know how to intervene. It’s also possible the manager believes she/he/they won’t be supported or that existing HR policies will be inadequate. Regardless, a failure to act will ultimately cause much greater problems for the manager and everyone else. And those problems often linger as people build resentment, begin to associate the workplace itself with the experience related to the toxic employee, and ultimately quit.

In short, of all the things that can be counter-productive and damaging in the work environment, the most detrimental is a toxic employee that management does nothing about, allowing the environment to be infected while creating the understandable belief that affected employees don’t matter. The solution doesn’t require firing someone on the spot, but it does require clearly naming it, articulating why it won’t be tolerated, and intervening to stop it. Ironically, such a damaging situation can actually be leveraged toward solidifying cultural values that may increase employee engagement and provide long term value.