Sansberry Organizational Harm Institute™
The Sansberry Organizational Harm Institute™ produces the field's most rigorous classification system for organizational harm, along with the diagnostic tools and practitioner credentials organizations need to move from recognition to structured, lasting response.
The research on toxic leadership, abusive supervision, and organizational dysfunction has existed for decades. What has not existed is a unified, forensic framework that organizations and practitioners can deploy with confidence in the field's most complex environments.
The Sansberry Organizational Harm Institute fills that gap. Every definition in the Organizational Harm Taxonomy™ meets standards of scholarly precision. Every tool and certification is immediately deployable in active field settings. Those two requirements are not in tension. They are the point.
Organizations that have run investigations, completed trainings, and updated policies, and watched the same patterns return, come to the Institute because the problem requires a different level of rigor than what those processes were built to deliver.
"The science of organizational harm. The methodology to stop it."
Sansberry Organizational Harm Institute™
People don't just survive organizational harm. They survive what happens when they report it. The Institute produces the tools and credentials that change what happens next.
The OHT™ is the first structured classification system to name and define the behavioral mechanisms through which organizations harm people, with each of the 16 behaviors documented at forensic precision and with its AI-enabled manifestation defined. It is the intellectual foundation of every Institute product, tool, and certification.
No existing organizational harm framework documents AI-enabled behavior at this level of specificity. The OHT™ is the first. Each behavior is mechanistically defined, giving organizations a shared language to move from recognition to structured action.
Organizations that work with the Institute gain more than a report or a training. They gain a classification system, a diagnostic methodology, and practitioners trained to deploy it, so the capacity to address harm becomes part of how the organization operates.
The OHT™ gives leadership, HR, legal, and practitioners a shared vocabulary precise enough to act on. Organizations move from vague discomfort to named, classifiable behavior, which changes what is possible in every conversation and decision that follows.
Harm recurs when organizations address incidents rather than sources. The OHT™ identifies the specific behavioral and structural mechanisms producing harm so that interventions reach the origin rather than the symptom, and stay effective once the engagement ends.
Organizations come to the Institute because something remains unresolved after engagement programs have run. This work reaches the structural and behavioral sources those programs were not designed to address, because it was built specifically for that purpose.
The goal is not only to respond to harm. It is to give organizations the infrastructure to identify harm early, intervene with authority, and build the structural conditions that make recurrence harder over time.
Whether your organization needs diagnostic capacity, trained practitioners, or systems-level assessment tools, the Institute has a structured entry point. All three draw from the same foundational framework.
The classification system behind all Institute work. Sixteen behaviors across five clusters, each forensically defined with a documented AI-enabled manifestation. The foundation every practitioner and organization draws from when addressing harm with rigor.
Learn MoreA cohort-based practitioner certification for experienced HR consultants, workplace investigators, executive coaches, and mediators. Each module delivers a complete, deployable service offering. Six new billable specializations upon completion. Built for the cases where standard approaches fall short.
Learn About COHA™OHT™-based diagnostic tools for individuals and organizations. Free tools give individuals language for what they are experiencing. Premium tools give organizations the systems-level infrastructure to identify harm patterns, assess conditions, and build response capacity.
Explore the ToolsDr. Kevin Sansberry II is an organizational behavior scholar, doctoral practitioner, and the developer of the Organizational Harm Taxonomy™. He holds a Doctor of Business Administration in Organizational Behavior and has spent nearly a decade consulting with organizations on the behavioral and structural conditions that produce harm, dysfunction, and coercive control.
His published research addresses abusive supervision and CEO narcissism. His dissertation examined the concealment of identity under abusive supervision and became the basis for a TEDx talk of the same name. He is the founder of KEVRA: The Culture Company and the host of the Toxic Leadership Podcast.
He founded the Institute on a single conviction: that practitioners and organizations working inside harmful environments deserve tools as rigorous as the problems they face.
The Institute works with organizations, practitioners, and researchers who are ready to address organizational harm with the level of rigor the problem demands.