Pathological culture is one where an individualist workplace environment is the norm. A pathological culture involves mistrust, fear, and a lack of communication among employees. Let’s discuss the characteristics of pathological culture in detail.

Mistrust and Fear: Pathological culture promotes workplace politics, creating an uncollaborative and mistrustful environment. The fear of blame and punishment for failure prevents innovation among employees.

Siloed Communication: Pathological culture promotes silos between different departments. It promotes hierarchy and formal communication channels. Information flow between different departments is discouraged.

Blame Oriented: Pathological culture is blame-oriented. Individuals focus on deflecting responsibilities instead of finding solutions to problems and learning from their mistakes. They look for a scapegoat in case of failure resulting in finger-pointing and eventually punishment.

Lack of Shared Responsibility: In pathological culture, employees lack a sense of shared responsibility. 

Usually, decision-making power is in the hands of a few individuals or departments.

Psychological Pressure: Pathological culture creates psychological pressure among employees. Employees live in a constant fear of being blamed which makes them inefficient in work.

Pathological culture is bad for DevOps. It benefits only a few people in the organization. Manipulative and inefficient people are rewarded while the voices of hardworking and sincere people are ignored. While fewer non-deserving people benefit from it, the organization suffers.