29 Times People Tried To Sabotage Others, Only To Get Hit By Karma

Why do these stories pop up so much at work? Psychologists and sociologists say it’s no coincidence. Work teams are like little communities where negativity - whether obvious or sneaky - tends to bounce back to the person who started it.

The authors of this article on Slow Leadership introduce the concept of "work karma" in a statistical rather than mystical sense. In other words, meanness, humiliation, and sabotage by one or more team members only worsen the overall moral and ethical climate within the team, and other people begin to act similarly.

Sooner or later, those bad moves come back to bite the people who started them. The study sums it up like this: if you throw aggression and disrespect into the mix, it’ll come back to you - multiplied by how many people get involved.