Before taking a position with a new company, how does one avoid a toxic company culture? Applicants are well within their rights to interview current employees to obtain honest feedback on the company culture. If you are not allowed to interview existing employees of your choice, this could be a sign your future employer is hiding a toxic workplace. For those in the job market, the following are potential clues a workplace has a noxious work environment.

• Employees are not allowed to voice their honest opinion on workplace issues.
• Employees fall in or out of leadership’s favor without explanation, and as a result, are included or excluded from company events, projects or meetings.
• Employees with opposing viewpoints are not welcomed visitors to the executive suite.
• Employees are fired without warning or explanation, nor are they given the opportunity to address the real issues leading to their departure.
• Receptionists and assistants tend to be beautiful, attractive eye-candy for chauvinistic executives.
• Overweight people are routinely urged by leadership to exercise and made to feel inferior to their slender coworkers and leaders.
• Employees are expected to assume heavier workloads and work excessive overtime while legitimate requests for headcount increases are denied, all while the company is promoting the importance of work/life balance.
• Employees with excellent reputations are abruptly fired or transferred because their performance is suddenly unsatisfactory.
• The human resources department is viewed by leadership as an administrative function or transaction facilitator rather than a partner in developing great people and work environments.
• The human resources department merely follows orders from leadership and is afraid to question company practices.
• Rude behavior is routinely allowed.
• Employees who treat people with trust and respect are considered weak and not management material.
• Tough, no-nonsense supervisory behavior is rewarded.
• Executives are assigned reserved parking spaces.
• The CEO and his/her executive team rarely walk around the office to visit with employees.
• Company information or news is not consistently shared with the entire workforce.
• Employees routinely read breaking news about their company in the local newspaper or online news services rather than from internal company publications.
• Press releases are distributed to public media outlets prior to employee distribution.
• Political views of the leaders are expressed to employees, and the employees are expected to blindly support and/or vote for those causes.
• Executives have their own restrooms.
• The company has a code of conduct policy but does not provide regular training to leaders or employees.
• Employees are expected to intuitively know what is expected from them without explanation and can be disciplined for not following these unwritten rules of conduct or performance.
• Employees who raise legitimate company issues are summarily terminated without cause.
• Executives hire C-level and professional staff outside the approved recruiting process and do not carefully consider the recruit’s management style or their potential impact on company culture.

Your chest is pounding. Anxious feelings resurface as painful office altercations replay in your mind causing a sick feeling in your stomach. Your shoulders and neck begin to tighten and ache. Your mind ruminates over last week’s noxious encounter with a bully manager and his evil recruits. Although Sunday is supposed to be a restful day to invigorate your mental and physical wellbeing, you find yourself mentally clocked-in at the office, clocked-out at home, and woefully dreading the next day to begin. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, this is a common Sunday afternoon mental exercise American workers relive at the beginning of many work weeks. Sadly, the recurrence of fear and trepidation on Sunday is well-founded. Researchers discovered a few years ago the deadliest time of the week is Monday morning as workers return to their job. There are twenty percent more incidents of heart attacks on Mondays due to the stress of returning to toxic company cultures with abusive managers.

Although brave soldiers have sacrificed and the United States have spent billions to stop violence against defenseless countries and our world allies, our nation has not gained control of the increasing psychological violence inside the borders of the American workplace. Civility, trust and respect seem to be losing ground to schoolyard-type bullies who work in the corner office. Competition for promotions, raises and bonuses can bring out the worst in people. If results at any cost are rewarded, company managers and employees may resort to bullying behavior to get things done; an unethical, inhumane, but perfectly legal management technique in America.

Although it is illegal to discriminate against women or minorities based on sex or race, it is perfectly legal in the United States for an unreformed-schoolyard-bully-turned-executive to yell, scream, berate, curse, belittle, exclude, or be downright cruel to employees. According to Dr. Gary Namie, Workplace Bullying Institute, “Bullying is mostly legal. Employers can ignore it with little risk. However, it is four times more prevalent than illegal status-based discrimination.”

Some companies encourage and reward bullying tactics that force employees to cower and passively accept their role to do what you are told. Typically, an employee who complains of such bullying behavior to human resources will eventually be terminated in a matter of days, weeks or months. Although human resources should review, investigate and resolve each employee relations issue in an objective manner, human resource professionals and friends of the bully tend to turn against the target of the bullying behavior.

When company leadership adopts, models and promotes positive people practices and initiates the process of creating a great place to work, the toxic levels inside the organization will begin to fall and employee energy and engagement will begin to rise.

Anyone can have a bad day and lash out at a coworker. Civilized people will later apologize for their poor behavior. On the other hand, there are certifiably rude people in corporate America who have made incivility, rudeness and verbal abuse a way of life in business. The companies who employ these violent neanderthals in business suits should beware of their negative consequences.

In a recent behavioral study reported by Harvard Business Review, it was determined that workers on the receiving end of verbal abuse became impaired in their ability to perform tasks. According to researchers, “their studies indicate that after exposure to rudeness, people think hard about the incident—whether just ruminating or trying to formulate a response—and those thought processes take cognitive resources away from other tasks.”

“The mere thought of being on the receiving end of verbal abuse hurts people’s ability to perform complex tasks requiring creativity, flexibility, and memory recall,” according to Christine Porath of the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Amir Erez of the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida.

The study also found the environmental impact of rudeness to be very profound and overreaching to even those outside the receiving end of the abuse. Researchers stated, “Verbal abuse affects more than just those who experience it directly; it apparently can harm innocent bystanders.”

If you want your company culture to deteriorate with increasing doses of fear, risk aversion, inability to make decisions, and lack of communication, employ or promote rude people. In other words, trying to create a great workplace while employing rude people is a recipe for failure.

It is common for business leaders to allow executives, rainmakers, and movers and shakers to behave in a rude manner, including verbal and psychological abuse. Leaders falsely believe the rude rainmaker’s contributions overcompensate for the toxic venom they spew in the office. Some mistaken leaders believe a toxic tyrant’s abuse causes employees to work harder.

Do you want to build an energized, profitable and high-performance organization? Require your leaders to take a stand against rude behavior. At times doing the right thing is difficult—it calls for strength of character—but it brings great rewards. The CEO must weed out abusive employees no matter their position in the organization. By doing so, the organization can return to an environment conducive to creativity, flexibility, productivity and profitability.