Toxic personalities can do damage to business and societies if left unchecked and given a free hand to spread to other arenas. Businesses and societies often suffer when toxic personalities take leading roles within business and civic positions in a way that create legitimacy for illegitimate behaviors. Left unchecked and the costs to corporate growth and national development become apparent.
In business and politics the ability to arrest the spread of toxic values and remove toxic influence to save an organization can also be dependent on the policies and objective enforcement of rules, policies and laws. The strength of an organization often being defined by the ability to correct paths when such personalities derail what is in everyone's best interest.
The code of ethics by which we all life doesn't function with such personalities as they often focus only on themselves and their sense of power over others. Things like lying, stealing, manipulating, targeting, embezzlement, taking advantage of customers and even violence are not internally controlled but externally controlled by organization/society.
Such individuals don't stop because their brains tell them to stop but because there are consequences they don't like (arrest, replacement, lost investments, lost reputation, etc..). All to often, they stop only when the costs to their companies (i.e. Enron), cost to institutions (i.e. bankruptcy in Detroit), and the social costs (racially divided communities) becomes unbearable and people rally to protect a greater principle.
Strengthening our system means putting checks and balances in place that can limit the reach of a distorted personality (i.e. downing of local institutions based on embedded values of hate and entitlement). We have such checks and balances in our national system such as the executive, judicial and legislative branch. As long as they operate independently and with good moral judgment as supported by a code of ethics our problems will be resolved relatively quickly.
Companies can also create their own internal controls to help ensure that strong personalities don't overly influence and derail the wider needs of the organization and its corporate social responsibilities. Sometimes that comes through the HR department and sometimes that might require outside intervention and/or board of director action.
Risks rise when the culture of an organization becomes increasingly toxic and people feel they must create cliques and loyalties in order to maintain their position. That typically occurs when higher developed people who have a sense of duty and follow a code of ethics are removed because they are not easily intimidated and don't allow for overreaching authority (This is why the best and brightest should take leading positions in any organization and not the most "connected". It improves performance and keeps organizations focused on their goals versus being derailed by toxic personalities.)
For example the national institutions only become at risk when there are factors that can influence the decision making of institutions and in turn could derail them from their duties (i.e. hyper political parties, social groups, ethnic/religious clanship, nepotism, etc.). If the political environment becomes toxic we may find institutions defaulting based on these artificial divisions.
A toxic personality profits from creating intentional divisions in order to protect themselves from account and maintain unfair advantages. Their vary goal is divide and conquer by triangulating people by stirring up controversies and loyalties in a way where people waste exorbitant amount of energy and talent on fictitious but often seemingly real issues (i.e. delusional sense of reality based on false social construction).
Thus, toxic personalities can damage and influence the weaker personalities around them and when they amass power they begin to bully others and across institutional lines in a way that creates real risks for businesses and society. For example, when people take on important roles within those institutions they have duties beyond their party politics (or other) and into the fulfillment of greater purposes within society but then begin to default based on conflictual lines.
Think back to your own personal example or something you read in the news and ask yourself how might a wider adherence to fulfilling one's duties with honor and role of a code of ethics might have avoided much bigger problems? How might such individuals be written as heroes or fiends in Americas development based on more objective historical analysis?
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