Kiss up, Kick Down: How Systems Reward It.

Professionals at all levels can experience an exhausting inflection point when they can not identify the locus of workplace dysfunction.

This article is not going to point fingers at a single "bad" leader or team. Instead, we take a look at the groundswell in which everyone from frontline staff to mid-level managers finds themselves pushing against a current they didn't create. Managers are squeezed betwixt and between heavy profit margins and over-burdened teams, while staff watch their most diligent work get extracted and absorbed rather than recognized or rewarded.

Standard professional advice can fail in this environment. Having a "direct conversation," seeking mediation, or escalating to HR won't work because you aren't fighting an individual conflict. You are navigating an architecture.

To survive, it is necessary to start diagnosing the structural build.

Recognizing the specific criteria of a broken system is the most critical professional judgment you will make. It keeps you from burning your energy trying to fix a machine that is working exactly as it was designed to. Unmasking those invisible blueprints is precisely what the Wild at Work Structural Tell was built to do.

A clear definition of bullying will help to examine structural dynamics that support or mitigate it.

Workplace bullying is repeated, unreasonable behavior directed toward an employee or group of employees that creates a risk to health and safety. Repetition and pattern are core criteria of bullying. A single difficult interaction is a conflict or a bad day.

A sustained, targeted pattern of behavior that the target has difficulty defending themselves against is bullying. That distinction, between isolated incident and systematic conduct, is the foundation of every response framework that follows.

Bullying is an overarching term that includes behaviors across five recognizable categories. These behaviors can certainly be enacted by an individual. But, more difficult to pinpoint, they can also be supported by the system.

There is a dangerous myth that workplace toxicity settles neatly at the bottom of the org chart. It doesn't. The truest structural tell of a "kiss up, kick down" system is just how high the dysfunction climbs. It is an architecture that squeezes everyone beneath the topmost tier, and sometimes there as well.

This architecture can brutally affect middle managers. They can find themselves caught betwixt and between, squeezed from above by executives demanding ruthless profit margins, and squeezed from below by an exhausted, disgruntled team. Without the systemic authority to change corporate policy, these managers are forced to act as the shock absorbers for a design they didn't build.

When toxicity is embedded in the infrastructure, seniority offers no immunity. Directors, strategists, and vice presidents find that the higher they climb, the more the system demands their complicity. It forces a grim choice: pass the kick down the chain, or become the next target. When survival requires silencing your own ethics, the entire structure is compromised.

The literature on systemic workplace bullying has accelerated significantly in 2024 and 2025. Three studies specifically shift the frame from individual behavior to organizational architecture.

1. Research published in the International Journal of Public Sector Management in 2025: Examining 21 senior managers in the Australian public sector, found that organizational culture, performance management systems, and institutional power dynamics do not merely create conditions in which bullying is possible. They actively enable, obscure, and in some cases reward it.

Researchers identified performance management systems as tools that can inadvertently or deliberately hide bullying behaviors behind the language of accountability.

2. A 2025 scoping review published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership found that structural and cultural factors drive a self-perpetuating process involving what researchers call pathological technologies of power, complex power relations embedded in institutional structures that make harmful behavior both possible and difficult to name or address.

The review concluded that a systemic approach is not optional for understanding workplace bullying. It is required.

3. Research published in Human Resource Management in 2025 called explicitly for HRM models that are structurally, institutionally, and ideologically attuned to violence emerging from inequality and institutional complicity.

The authors argue that the existing framing of workplace violence and bullying as primarily interpersonal is inadequate to capture what is actually happening in contemporary organizations.

Performance management systems can inadvertently obscure bullying behaviors. The structure does not just enable the behavior. Sometimes the structure requires the behavior.

The Structural Tell is a Wild at Work proprietary framework developed from peer-reviewed research in organizational psychology, workplace bullying, and institutional dynamics. It provides six diagnostic questions that identify whether the dysfunction is an individual problem or a structural one, or both.

The answer to those questions determines the effective response. Individual problems have individual solutions. Structural problems require a different category of response entirely.

1. Does the behavior survive your professional attempts to address it?

When you raise a concern through appropriate channels, with evidence, with professionalism, and the behavior continues without meaningful consequence, the system is telling you something. Not necessarily that you did it wrong. That the system is protecting the behavior rather than addressing it.

A 2025 study of bullying discourse across organizational types found that in large institutions, workers consistently report systemic helplessness, ie: following reporting, the formal process does not resolve the problem because the formal process is operating within the same structure that produced it.

2. Does it involve more than one actor or level of the organization?

A single difficult person is a personnel issue.

When multiple people at different levels appear to be operating from the same narrative about you, when the story travels from your direct manager to HR to senior leadership without independent verification, you are looking at a structural dynamic, not an interpersonal one.

Research identifies this seeping narrative about you as the marker of institutionally enabled rather than individually originated behavior.

3. Does it predate your specific situation?

Structural bullying has a history. Other people in similar roles, under similar management, in similar circumstances have had similar experiences. When you discover that the pattern predates you, that others before you have moved through versions of the same dynamic, you are not dealing with something you caused or could have prevented. You are encountering a structure that was already in place when you arrived.

4. Is disrespectful behavior pervasive across leadership?

When contempt, dismissiveness, and disrespect are modeled at the senior level and no consequence follows, when the behavior of those at the top sets the behavioral standard for those below, the organization has communicated its values through conduct rather than policy. One disrespectful leader is a personnel issue.

Disrespect that travels down through multiple levels of leadership without interruption is a cultural instruction.

What the organization tolerates at the top indicates exactly what it will tolerate everywhere else.

5. Does promotion appear to require bullying?

In some organizational cultures, advancement is structurally linked to a willingness to engage in the behaviors that characterize toxic management, taking credit for others' work, undermining peers, managing through fear, and maintaining proximity to power through compliance rather than contribution.

When the people who get promoted are consistently the people who exhibit these behaviors, the organization is not failing to address the culture, it is rewarding it.

The promotion pattern is the clearest single indicator of what the organization actually values, regardless of what the values statement says.

6. Is behavior included in performance review?

Organizations that measure only output and ignore conduct have made a structural choice. That choice has consequences. When a high-performing individual who bullies colleagues is protected because of their numbers, the message to the rest of the organization is explicit: results matter, behavior does not.

Research on organizational antecedents of bullying culture consistently identifies the absence of behavioral accountability in performance management as a primary structural enabler.

What gets measured gets managed. What does not get measured gets ignored, until it becomes a crisis.

If the behavior survives your attempts to address it, involves more than one actor, predates your situation, is modeled by leadership, is rewarded through promotion, and is absent from performance review: you are not dealing with a conflict. You are dealing with a system.

Organizations are not passive environments in which bullying happens. They are active systems that either enable or interrupt it.

Research suggests that the organizational response to bullying, or the absence of one, is the single most significant variable in whether the behavior continues and escalates.

Systems that support the bully:

→ Protect high performers regardless of conduct.

→ Promote people who demonstrate aggressive management styles.

→ Allow HR processes to be used as instruments of retaliation against complainants.

→ Fail to include behavioral standards in performance review.

→ Model disrespect at the senior leadership level without consequence.

→ Create ambiguous authority structures that allow power to be exercised informally and unaccountably.

→ Respond to formal complaints with investigations of the complainant rather than the behavior.

The research also notes that it is possible to amend systems that had fallen into supporting a toxic environment. To be clear: That is different from those systems that are deliberately designed to profit from it.

Systems that prevent the bully:

→ Include behavioral expectations explicitly in performance review at every level.

→ Apply the same standards to high performers that they apply to everyone else.

→ Treat formal complaints as information about organizational health, not as threats to manage.

→ Model respectful conduct at the senior level and make the modeling visible.

→ Create safe, truly anonymous reporting mechanisms.

→ Track patterns of complaint, attrition, and team instability by manager and department.

→ Promote people who build others up rather than those who manage through fear.

$300B lost annually to workplace bullying in the United States alone. (Chapman 2018)

Organizations that allow structural bullying to continue rarely experience a single identifiable cost. Losses emerge as a pattern of diffuse, seemingly unrelated expenses that accumulate over time until they become impossible to ignore.

Questions might start with where the money is going, trying to identify the 'leak in the balloon,' while time is taken with handling the behavior rather than focusing on the task at hand. In contexts with billable hours, that can add up fast.

62% of workplace bullying targets lose their jobs, the organization loses them too (WBI 2024).

4 years of longitudinal data shows sustained bullying changes personality (Swiss National Centre Study 2025).

Beyond financial cost, the research documents a cascade of organizational consequences that structural bullying produces when it goes unaddressed. Psychological safety collapses. High performers who have options leave first. The people who remain are either compliant with the culture or too depleted to leave. Institutional knowledge walks out with every departure. Recruitment costs spiral as the employer brand erodes. Legal exposure accumulates as the pattern of behavior becomes documented and discoverable.

The research published in 2026 on toxicity normalization shows that the longer structural bullying goes unaddressed, the more entrenched it becomes and the harder it is to interrupt without significant organizational disruption. The organizations that pay the highest price are not the ones that addressed structural bullying early, they are the ones that waited until the cost became undeniable.

The organizations that retain their best people, their culture, and their institutional knowledge are not the ones that had no bullies. They are the ones whose systems were designed to interrupt bullying before it became the norm.

The research identifies several specific mechanisms through which organizational structures enable and sustain workplace bullying. Naming them, as with any response to bullying, matters because they are frequently presented as legitimate management practices.

Performance Management as Punishment

Performance management systems designed to develop staff become instruments of targeting when they are applied selectively, when criteria shift after delivery, when documentation is created to build a case rather than to support improvement, and when the standards applied to one person differ materially from those applied to others in comparable roles.

Information Deprivation

When access to information necessary for professional functioning is systematically withheld, the impact on the target is both professional and psychological. Research on the Orbit Family of behaviors, exclusion, isolation, information withholding, shows that this mechanism is particularly effective in institutional settings because it can be attributed to organizational efficiency, need-to-know protocols, or simple oversight rather than deliberate targeting.

Process Weaponization

Grievance procedures, HR complaint processes, and formal reporting mechanisms designed to protect employees can become instruments of further harm when they are controlled by the same institutional actors enabling the bullying. Research consistently documents targets who report formally and find themselves subjected to counter-complaints, capability procedures, or restructuring processes that were initiated in direct response to their report. The formal process becomes part of the campaign.

Narrative Capture: Reclaiming Your Truth

The systematic establishment of a negative institutional narrative about the target, communicated through informal channels, embedded in performance documentation, and repeated by multiple actors until it becomes the accepted organizational story, is one of the most damaging and least visible mechanisms of structural bullying. Once the narrative is captured, the target is positioned as the problem. Everything they do to address the situation is interpreted through that damning frame.

If the Structural Tell questions point to a structural rather than individual problem, the response framework changes significantly. This is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to change strategy.

→ Name it as structural in any formal communication. The language matters. 'I am experiencing a pattern of behavior across multiple people and levels of the organization' is categorically different from 'I have a problem with my manager.' It signals that you understand the architecture.

Managers who suspect that what is happening on or around their team is structural rather than interpersonal face a specific challenge: The very systems they would normally use to address the problem may be part of it. The question is not only what the individual is doing. The question is what the organization is permitting, enabling, or requiring.

Research from the Australian public sector study found that organizational change processes, restructuring, reform, new management mandates, create specific windows during which bullying behaviors escalate because accountability structures are in flux.

Managers who identify structural problems and attempt to address them individually, through direct management of the behavior without addressing the institutional conditions producing it, consistently find the behavior returns. Structural intervention requires naming the structural conditions to the people who have the authority to change them, daunting in a context where toxicity is the baseline state.

This is also why poor reactions from staff at all levels can develop not from individual character but from accumulated experience of raising concerns that go nowhere. The behavior is merely a symptom of the greater structural causes.

The most powerful intervention in structural bullying is identification before entry. Five questions, asked directly in an interview or during due diligence on a new role, reveal more about organizational structure than any amount of employer branding.

1. How are decisions made here? A healthy organization can describe this clearly. Vagueness, deflection, or the sudden introduction of complexity signals that decision-making is informal, concentrated, or protected.

2. What does accountability look like when something goes wrong? Organizations with functioning accountability can describe a process. Organizations where accountability is selective cannot.

3. Can you tell me about someone who raised a formal concern and what happened? Watch for the pivot. The introduction of confidentiality as a reason not to answer is itself an answer.

4. How long did the previous person in this role stay, and where are they now? Turnover patterns in a specific role or under a specific manager are not coincidences. They are data.

5. What does success look like here and how is it recognized? Vague references to culture fit, loyalty, and going above and beyond in place of clear, transparent criteria describe an organization where advancement is based on proximity to power rather than contribution.

This article has introduced the framework. The guide goes further. It covers all six diagnostic questions in full, the five structural markers with relevant lines of inquiry and a documentation checklist, specific recourse strategies for targets, allies, and managers already inside the organization, the Narrative Capture Recovery framework, scripts for the formal conversations, and the complete response framework for escalation and exit.

→ The five structural markers in complete detail, each with specific prompts and identifiers to build a formal record. The guide includes templates for that record.

→ A five-marker checklist formatted as a documentation record, ready to take into an HR meeting or legal consultation.

→ Specific scripts, templates, and plans of steady action for the Target, Ally, and Manager who are aware of and caught up in the structural web of dysfunction.

→ The Narrative Capture Recovery framework: A step-by-step process to interrupt the negative institutional narrative that has been established about you and build your professional counter-record.

→ Two complete response frameworks: documentation for escalation and documentation for exit, with the specific steps each requires.

→ The Non-Negotiables: What must be protected regardless of whether you stay or go.

We offer these frameworks so that individuals can assess their context, apply tools, and design scripts specifically. The aim is to protect the individual, support their career path, and hopefully amend systems so that they support respectful working environments.

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Hodgins, M. et al. (2025). A Scoping Review of Bullying and Harassment in Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations. Nonprofit Management and Leadership.

Cooke, F.L. et al. (2025). From Workplace-Based to Work-Related Violence: Reframing HRM Research and Practice. Human Resource Management, Wiley.

PubMed (2025). From Bureaucracy to Startups: How Workplace Bullying Is Talked About on Online Employee Communities.

Frontiers in Psychology (2025). Protected grounds of discrimination and the risk of workplace bullying.

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