High Output. Low Integrity. That's Not High Performance - that's Psychosocial Risk.

Tenneile Manenti
May 11
6 min read

Man looking out window at work under stress from toxic employee

You know the person.

Everyone does. That's the problem.

They hit their numbers. They might even exceed them. And when their name comes up in a conversation about performance, the instinct — almost automatic — is to reach for words like valuable and high-performing and we couldn't afford to lose them.

Meanwhile, two desks away, someone is dreading Monday.

We've been measuring performance with a ruler that only reaches halfway across the room. It captures what a person delivers individually. It says nothing about what their presence costs everyone else. And the gap between those two measurements is where the real damage lives — quietly, expensively, and usually long before anyone is willing to name it.

"High Performance" - The label is doing the wrong work

When we call someone a high performer, we're usually describing their individual output. Revenue generated. Targets met. Deliverables landed. These are measurable things, and measurable things feel like solid ground.

What the label doesn't capture: what happens to everyone else's performance while this person is in the room.

When a team member spends cognitive energy anticipating the next incident, managing their own exposure, or deciding what's safe to say in a meeting — that's capacity that isn't going into their work. When people stop contributing ideas because experience has taught them what follows — that's a direct tax on the organisation's collective intelligence. When someone dreads coming in, that emotional load doesn't disappear at the door. It sits in the body all day and it costs something.

A person who produces strong individual results while quietly degrading the output, wellbeing and retention of the people around them is not a high performer.

They are a net negative carrying a high performer's badge.

The definition was just too narrow to show it.

What the research actually says

In 2015, Harvard Business School researchers Michael Housman and Dylan Minor studied over 50,000 workers across 11 companies. They wanted to understand the true cost of a toxic worker — defined as someone whose behaviour causes harm to the organisation and the people in it.

The numbers are worth sitting with.

Replacing an average worker with a genuine superstar — someone in the top 1% of individual performance — added approximately $5,300 to a company's bottom line.

The cost of a single toxic worker? Approximately $12,500 (US figure). And that figure only accounts for turnover — the colleagues who left because of them, and the expense of replacing those people. It doesn't include psychological injury claims. It doesn't count the productivity lost while the team rebuilt trust. It doesn't touch the legal exposure.

The researchers' conclusion was unambiguous: avoiding a toxic worker improves performance more than hiring a superstar.

We have been getting this calculation wrong, consistently, because we've been looking at the wrong numbers.

The leader who knows

Here's what I observe — both in my consulting work and in my therapy room.

The leader in this situation is rarely unaware.

By the time a team is showing signs of strain, the leader has usually had the side conversations. They've received the feedback. They've watched the dynamic play out in meetings. They know.

And then the excuses begin. Not dishonest ones, necessarily — just the ones that create enough distance to avoid acting.

"They're under a lot of pressure at the moment." "They're not usually like this." "They've been here a long time — it's complicated." "If I lose them, I lose the revenue."

This is rationalisation dressed as pragmatism. The leader isn't ignorant of the harm. They're managing their own discomfort about acting by finding reasons not to. And somewhere underneath the excuses, they already know those reasons won't hold.

What keeps leaders in this pattern isn't cruelty. It's a calculation — that acting creates disruption, conflict, a possible HR process, maybe a legal challenge. That waiting is the conservative choice. The safe option.

It isn't.

Under Safe Work Australia's Model Code of Practice on Managing Psychosocial Hazards, failing to address harmful behaviour — particularly where it creates an environment of unfairness or inconsistency — is explicitly categorised as poor organisational justice. Poor organisational justice is a recognised psychosocial hazard.

The conversation being avoided is not a neutral act. It is a risk management failure.

And here is the part that matters most from a legal standpoint: once a leader is aware of a psychosocial hazard and does not act, they have moved from didn't know to knew and did nothing. That is a materially different position under WHS obligations.

The fear of liability is, in this situation, actively generating it.

The signs that are already there — if you know where to look

Turnover data is one of the most misread signals in organisations navigating this situation.

When people leave a team at a higher rate than the rest of the business — the instinct is often to look at the leader. And sometimes that's right. But sometimes the turnover isn't because of what the leader is doing. It's because of what they're not doing.

The colleagues with the most options leave first. The ones who stay are often the ones who feel they can't afford not to — and they absorb what's left. Engagement quietly drops. Presenteeism rises. Ideas stop being offered. And eventually the psychological injury claims begin — by which point the pattern has been running for a long time.

These are lagging indicators. By the time they're visible in the data, the damage has been accumulating for months, sometimes years.

The early signals are softer: pockets of tension that don't match the broader culture, side conversations that never quite make it into formal feedback, a particular team that always seems to be under strain. Leaders who know how to read these signals — and who are willing to — will find them.

What it costs the people watching

The team members working alongside a tolerated toxic high performer are carrying something that rarely appears on a risk register.

They are managing their own exposure daily — deciding what to say, what not to say, who to tell, whether telling will make it worse. They are watching leadership's response for signals about what is and isn't acceptable. They are updating their understanding of the organisation's values in real time.

When the signal they receive is this person's output matters more than your experience — that lands as something more than frustration. It's a rupture in the psychological contract between an employee and their organisation. The conclusion people reach at that point is usually some version of: they care more about money than us.

Once that conclusion is reached, it is very hard to undo.

People don't always leave immediately after that rupture. They often stay. But something shifts — discretionary effort quietly disappears, genuine investment in the work fades, and eventually the people with the most options go. The ones without options stay and absorb it.

That's how psychological injury claims begin.

A more complete definition of performance

Performance is not what you deliver. It is what you deliver and what your presence makes possible — or impossible — for the people around you.

A performance framework that doesn't include cultural contribution, team impact, and behavioural standards isn't a performance framework. It's a revenue tracker. And revenue trackers don't tell you when the load-bearing wall is starting to crack.

The irony at the centre of this situation is worth naming plainly: in trying to protect their best performer, organisations are often damaging their best people, accumulating legal liability, and accelerating the exit of the colleagues they can least afford to lose.

That is not a high performance strategy. It is an expensive mistake with a very recognisable shape.

If you recognise this situation

If you're the person working alongside someone like this — and you've found yourself thinking why does no one else see it or why won't anyone do anything — what you're observing is real. The impact on you is real. You don't have to keep absorbing it quietly.

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If you're the leader who read this and recognised the situation in your own organisation — the fact that you're here matters. Awareness is the starting point. What happens next determines the outcome for your people, and for your organisation.

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If you're working in HR or people and culture and this is the conversation you keep having without traction — I work directly with teams on building the leadership capability to have exactly these conversations. Get in touch.