Companies love star employees. They love them so much that a lot of the human resources industry is geared toward hiring them.
Less attention is paid to making sure companies don't hire toxic employees. A working paper from Harvard's business school argues that shouldn't be the case.
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Avoiding toxic workers might seem like a no-brainer, but there's a catch -- they're often among the most productive workers. That's not a terribly new idea (plenty of studies have validated that hypothesis), but the notion that star employees can be more trouble than they're worth is.
The motivation to hire star employees is particularly great in the tech world, where companies are competing for high-end talent that can build innovative products. So-called "10X" employees -- termed that because they are 10 times as productive as average employees -- are in particularly high demand, and compensated accordingly. Mark Zuckerberg once said the engineers of a company that Facebook acquired were 100 times better than the average coder -- which is why Facebook paid $47 million for it despite only having 12 full-time employees.
The authors looked at data from more than 50,000 workers at 11 companies, measuring a range of actions of toxic workers from small offenses like stealing office supplies to far more severe acts like falsifying documents or sexual harassment.
"Since we found some evidence that a toxic worker can have more impact on performance than a 'superstar,' it may be that spending more time limiting negative impacts on an organization might improve everyone's outcome to a greater extent than only focusing on increasing positive impacts," the paper states.
That's not to say good employees aren't valuable, but the benefits of avoiding toxic ones, according to the authors, easily outweigh the loss of missing out on star workers. Housman and Minor write that doing so generates "returns of nearly two-to-one" for companies.