Toxic, passive-aggressive & absolutely dishonest personnel can destroy the most luxurious & fancy environment in the blink of an eye.
Discussion
Absolutely!
Do you feel this can be managed or improved through team open communications? Or would you say, it starts at the candidate screening level?
It can only be managed if the person being like that has a personal issue, they actually want to sort out in all honesty.
If that person does not even admit & recognise there is an issue, which is too often the case, there is no other way than to avoid that person.
However, sorting out that issue would probably be a therapy & not a job thing.
As to the candidate screening level, I'm not sure whether it would work in reality.
In theory, you just need a person, who is really really really great at reading people, to be able to sort out the toxic ones. Done deal.
However, in reality, you probably have to abide weird laws, so the not accepted one's cannot sue or something. I'm not a lawyer & it's different for every country, but I definitely do now, that more & more laws like that are making their way into daily work lives.
So, I imagine, that if you constantly weed out bad personnel like that, it would seem like, the reasons were arbitrary, from the eyes of the law.
Again, just a guess though. I'm not sure about those laws.