Calling a manager toxic is easy. Fixing the conditions behind it is harder.
For a growing number of American workers, the biggest source of stress at work isn’t the job. It’s the person running it. A new survey from The Harris Poll, conducted in April 2026 among more than 1,300 employed U.S. adults, found that 6 in 10 workers say they currently have a toxic boss. Seven in 10 say they’ve had one at some point in their career. The fallout is significant: nearly half report stress, burnout, or declining mental health, and two-thirds have left a job because of it.
Two researchers argue that organizations serve their people better by understanding what’s creating the experience than by trying to assign blame.
The manager-employee perception gap
Bennett Tepper has spent more than 25 years studying abusive supervision at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business in Columbus, Ohio. The Harris Poll numbers didn’t entirely surprise him, but he was skeptical of their scale.
“If you just ask people on a random basis if their boss is engaged in the behaviors that we characterize as toxic, bullying, or abusive, it’s more like 15%,” he said. “Even if we’re talking about 15%, maybe 20 at the high end, that’s a lot.”
What Tepper finds more telling is a different number entirely. When researchers ask managers whether they exhibit these behaviors, Tepper says the figure drops to roughly 1 or 2%.
“Most are pretty blind to it,” he said. “They would describe themselves as demanding or result-oriented rather than toxic or bullying.”
That gap, between self-perception and employee experience, is central to Heidi Brooks’ work. A senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut, Brooks argues that labeling managers as toxic is itself part of the problem.
“The framing of toxic is finger-pointing and blaming,” she said. “I want to call us to pay more attention to the system that’s afoot, while also remaining clear that people are responsible for their impact on others.”
Brooks points to the same underlying pressure. Managers are being asked to lead through an era of rapid change, economic uncertainty, and AI-driven transformation, often without the training or support to do it well. The Harris Poll found that 71% of workers link toxic behavior at least partly to current economic conditions. And 44% say their company invests more in AI than in one-on-one coaching for people managers.
“We’re in the largest technology investment cycle in a generation, and the human side of work is being left behind,” said Libby Rodney, Chief Strategy Officer at The Harris Poll in New York. “Toxic leadership isn’t a character flaw. It’s an investment failure.”
When the complaint hits HR’s desk
When an employee complains that their manager is toxic but there’s no clear policy violation, Tepper’s advice is to resist the urge to treat it as a one-off. It matters more than many organizations realize: just 1 in 4 employees believe HR will actually address toxic behavior at work, making how HR responds to these complaints critical to whether employees trust the process at all.
“I wouldn’t take any one data point as meaning a lot, but I would take a lot of data points as being helpful,” he said. “Exit interviews can be a rich source of information about how employees are experiencing their manager. A lot of current employees are going to be reluctant to say what they really think, but the folks who are on the way out may have more to say.”
He recommends that HR look for patterns across time and across employees: turnover rates, absenteeism, requests for internal transfers, the prevalence of employee relations cases. Where those patterns cluster around a particular manager, that’s where attention is warranted.
One of the most common obstacles is the high-performing manager. If a leader is hitting their numbers, organizations tend to look the other way. Tepper says that’s a mistake, and one that has a concrete financial cost.
“Bosses who are getting good results while being abusive are probably going to get better results if they’re not,” he said. “There’s no data that I’ve ever seen that suggests abuse contributes to better performance. We should be asking how they’re producing results, not just that they are.”
Brooks sees a related trap in the reflexive response. HR that stays purely in reactive mode, moving quickly from complaint to consequence, misses a longer-term opportunity.
“If you just stay in reactive mode and try to put out fires and get rid of the bad actors, you’re not taking a long-term enough lens with a contextual analysis of what’s happening in the system to get underneath the dynamic,” she said. “The reactive lens doesn’t create a culture of possibility and learning.”
She’s clear this isn’t an argument for letting harmful behavior slide. Accountability and remediation matter, she said, and the protections HR has built for employees shouldn’t be dismantled. But she pushes back on the idea that removing a manager is sufficient.
“Toxicity is a real thing. We do have bosses with bad behavior,” Brooks said. “But asking what is happening for managers right now is just as important as identifying the bad apples.”
Brooks isn’t alone in that observation. Recent research shows burnout has become a baseline experience for many workers, suggesting the stress employees attribute to their managers is often part of a much bigger picture.
Toxic leadership doesn’t fix itself
Part of what makes this hard is the role that perception itself plays. Brooks notes that employees don’t come to their views of a manager in a vacuum. Their own histories, stress levels, and tendency toward self-protective thinking all shape what they see.
“These perceptions of toxicity don’t just come from how people are behaving,” she said. “They also come from people’s likelihood of perceiving things.”
Once that perception takes hold, rebuilding trust is difficult. Brooks calls recovery from difficult exchanges one of the most important skills in the modern manager's toolkit. Trust, she said, is easy to lose and hard to rebuild.
Tepper says HR can use a manager’s own motivation as a lever. If a manager genuinely believes their aggressive style is what produces results, HR can challenge that assumption on performance terms, not just cultural ones.
“If you start tracking this behavior and say, your sales were good, but on this performance dimension it’s not good, that’s something they’re going to care about,” he said. “They don’t want to be good at one thing and not good at the other. The missing opportunity is to score them on all dimensions of performance.”
It’s a challenge that requires workplaces to have a functional feedback culture to begin with, and one that underscores why investment in leadership development matters. The Harris Poll found that 64% of workers believe leadership training is the single most effective way to reduce toxic behavior, ranking it above better pay and more headcount. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)’s 2025 State of the Workplace report identifies employee experience as a top strategic priority for HR, one that hinges directly on how managers treat the people they lead.
“It’s not hard to find data that shows aspiring managers that there’s a whole bunch of ways of holding people accountable without doing this,” he said. “It’s better for you as a manager, it’s better for your personal growth, it’s better for your employees, better for team performance. It’s just a matter of reorienting them around the skill set of holding people accountable in a way that’s civil.”
Brooks takes a similar view. The organizations that will come through this moment are the ones willing to hold the full complexity of it, taking employee experience seriously, investing in managers as people, and resisting the urge to look for someone to blame.
“People care about how they’re treated and we have to pay attention to that,” Brooks said. “It’s not just about the transactions and the bottom line.”
