Comment by fvdessen

I've had the 'chance' to work with some deeply manipulative persons in the past, the kind who goes to your desk and say 'Hey, I noticed you started to speak to X again, and your performance seems to suffer as a result", where X is a friendly colleague that opposed some plan of that person. It is incredibly difficult to keep those people in check as all that behaviour is off the record and impossible to prove. When people complain it's a 'you said, he said' situation where the manipulator inevitably wins. Wether those persons are positive or negative for the company is not all that clear, but they create an incredibly unpleasant work environment.