Generally, if I’ve experienced a toxic environment at a company I won’t want to go back. Even if the personnel had changed, the conditions that allowed the toxicity to flourish are probably still there.
However, early in my office career I had a six-month data entry stint for a large Australian insurance company. The pay wasn’t that great (although it paid more than working in a factory) and the people were nice.
At the end of that stint, I got offered a full time job and most of us were folded into a larger division at a different office. This division was the most toxic I’ve experienced. I could track the toxicity down to the manager of the division but didn’t know if it extended to his superiors. If I’d been laid off from there I probably never would have considered working for the company again.
I did manage to transfer out of there within 9 months though to another division/office, working in IT and the people were nice again. This said to me that the toxicity wasn’t company-wide and I would consider working for them again - although probably not their North American division, as I’ve heard pretty bad reports.
Yeah, I’ve always found any culture issues are not caused by any one person, it’s systemic and encouraged near the top.
I have left two companies before. One I would return to if I was desperate enough for a job (I hate consulting but I like the company well enough), the other I would never consider. It was complete misery there.
In the smaller ones, one person at the mid to senior level of decision-making can cause wide-scale destruction, specially if its a family run company and the person in question is related to that family.
Once worked at a company with multiple family members of the owner/CEO. Several of them were placed as managers directly out of college, then after a few years promoted to something like VP then sometimes C-level positions. Several of our C-suite executives were family members with 0 post-college work experience except being in the company.
They’re muddling along, still not doing especially well.