> if you work in a sufficiently toxic environment/culture for long enough, that very behavior that you try to fight against and change begins to seep into your everyday actions
It can carry through a person’s career, too.
I worked for a company that hired a lot of people out of a big tech company famous for being a grind, having a lot of PIPs, and generally keeping employees in constant fear of losing their jobs.
Some of the ex-employees of that company were wonderful to work with and appreciated working with us as a breath of fresh air.
However, a lot of them were clearly scarred by their experience at a toxic company. The worst of them were constantly in fear of being perceived as ranked lower than their peers (even though we didn’t rank!) and would make a lot of dumb moves to try to sabotage other people’s reputations. One guy went so far as to keep a long Google doc of what he saw as mistakes and missteps of his peers and managers, which he would then pull from as leverage whenever he thought someone might be a candidate for getting promoted past him. Another would have a emotional meltdown any time there was an issue with something he was accountable for and would rapidly write up a “post-mortem” that was really just a narrative that blamed someone else for the failure and demonstrated how he fixed it.
We didn’t have these problems with high performers we hired from anywhere else. It was something about this company that chewed people up and left some of them scarred and defensive.