I didn’t really understand what a toxic workplace was until one was described to me in painful detail. Sure, I’d seen unpleasant office cultures, but nothing like this.

It pertained to an academic department in a well-known London university back in 2005. A new dean had been appointed and quickly imposed some rather draconian performance measures. He reportedly said in his first staff meeting, “I’m going to make you all rich!” That set off the alarm bells straight away.

Impersonal hierarchies soon proliferated. Bullying became rife. Fear pervaded the atmosphere of the place. And then staff started to drop like flies, getting seriously ill. So people began to leave.

A professor I knew in the department told me a horrible, sewer-like smell then materialised from nowhere. Nobody could figure out where it was coming from but it was fairly symbolic of the morale inside the building. The night before his lectures, my friend said he’d lie awake in a state of panic, dreading the day to follow. He soon got out as well.

Toxic workplaces can ruin a workplace and the lives of employees. But a strange shift has occurred in the way it is construed by management experts. The emphasis is now on good and bad individual employees – their intrinsic personalities – not the management culture, pay and conditions or wider employment context that frames any work situation.

This individualisation of work is apparent in a recent study conducted by economists at Harvard Business School. They looked at office seating arrangements and its connection with performance. If an organisation places an average worker beside a good one then the average worker is suddenly more productive. They are inspired by what they see in their partner.

But it’s the toxic employees we need to worry about, according to the study. Put a good worker beside one of these characters, and his or her productivity will drop dramatically.

The lesson for managers is simple. Spread your “stars” around the office. And root out the toxic ones because they will hurt the organisation.

Such individualisation of jobs has been going on for a number of years. We are no longer meant to speak about bad cultures, crap pay or the tyranny of endless email. Now we only hear about bad employees who complain too much or cause trouble. Job performance is suddenly psychologised. Hence the army of personality experts now hired by large firms who promise to sort out the good workers from the bad.

There are a number of problems with this ultra-individual approach to jobs and workplaces .

First, highlighting good employees as well as bad ones relies on the fallacy that you can accurately measure someone’s individual contribution to overall productivity. Labour economists have been trying to do this for years with little success – that’s because collective organisational performance is always more than the sum total of its individual parts.

Individual metrics often backfire for this very reason. If I play a vital supportive role to an organisational “star” then I’ll be very miffed if he gets all the praise and I’m given a warning for letting the team down. Moreover, this tells us why the main justification for perverse levels of CEO pay – that it reflects what they add to the firm’s bottom line – is dubious at best

And second, perhaps the real problem with the individualisation of jobs is how it functions as kind of ideological smokescreen, where contextual or structural factors are ignored and the spotlight is placed on an employee’s attitude instead. Their personality, enthusiasm and willingness.

Highlighting good and bad staff relies on the fallacy that you can accurately measure someone’s individual contribution

Feel exploited? Unhappy with how you are treated by the boss? Haven’t had a pay rise in 10 years? Then the real problem must be you, not the wider forces that have steadily eroded the world of work over the last few years. You alone are to blame. We can see how this ideology fits neatly with neoliberal capitalism and its cult of individual responsibility.

Of course, every once in a while we may come across an authentic office psychopath or outlandish bully. They’re no different in any environment. But by the same token, these creeps tend to thrive in workplaces that have been distorted by employment policies that encourage insecurity and desperation – especially where power and hierarchies are involved. In fairer, more just situations they seldom gain a foothold.

Instead of talking about toxic employees, we really ought to be focusing on the employment sector as a whole. The Uber-style toxicity that has taken over work culture following the rise of “zero-hours” contracts and concomitant eye-watering inequality can certainly be reversed. But individual-centric views of business and management won’t get us there.

• Peter Fleming is professor of business and society at City, University of London. His new book, The Death of Homo Economicus, is published next month