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Toxic Leadership
Toxic leadership exists in virtually every arena of social life. It takes a special toll, however, in the workplace, where workers frequently feel particularly constrained to acquiesce to employers and managers whom they perceive as controlling their professional and economic destinies.
Toxic leaders in the workplace inflict serious and lasting harm on their employees, their colleagues, their organizations, and stockholders, even their customers and clients. They do so by virtue of their destructive behaviors and dysfunctional personal qualities. The garden variety “difficult boss” does not qualify as a toxic leader. Only those leaders who leave their followers and organizations measurably worse off than they found them—sometimes even totally destroying them—fall within this definition of toxic leaders.
Toxic leadership represents a social/psychological phenomenon, whose complexity is reflected in the fact that the same individual may be viewed as noxious by some and heroic by others, as toxic in certain situations and nontoxic in others, as intentionally damaging in particular circumstances but unintentionally harmful in still others. Consequently, understanding and defending oneself and others against various forms of toxic leadership require a multidimensional framework, one that takes into account both toxic leaders as well as their intended and unintended victims.
The Toxic Leader's Side of the Equation
At least six dimensions of the leader's decisions and actions need to be considered. These include intentionality; intensity and duration of the harm; nature and number of destructive behaviors and dysfunctional personal characteristics; and significance and impact of the outcomes.
In terms of intentionality, leaders who deliberately injure others or knowingly enhance themselves at great cost to others we consider intentionally toxic. Leaders who inadvertently cause substantial harm to others by careless or reckless behavior or faulty character structure, including incompetence and cowardice, we categorize as unintentionally toxic. Intensity of the leader's toxicity may vary considerably, as may the duration of harm; however, both intensity and duration must have a sufficiently significant impact to warrant the diagnosis of toxicity.
Behaviors of Toxic Leaders
Space limitations permit only an abbreviated list of destructive behaviors that qualify for inclusion in the toxic leader's repertoire. Among the most destructive behaviors that toxic leaders use are the following:
- Violating human rights, by eliminating or destroying individuals through undermining, incapacitating, humiliating, intimidating, demoralizing, seducing, isolating, disenfranchising, and/or firing them without just cause
- Stifling constructive criticism and enforcing compliance with the leader's decisions through inappropriate means
- Weakening and/or destroying the organizational systems intended to promote truth, excellence, and equity, and otherwise engaging in deceitful, unethical, illegal, and/or criminal behavior
- Setting followers against one another, identifying scapegoats, and/or inciting disdain or other mistreatment of those the leader perceives as his or her opponents
- Deliberately creating the illusion that the leader is the only one through whose special gifts the followers can succeed, thereby increasing the leader's power and decreasing the followers' self-confidence. This behavioral strategy may involve stimulating the followers' most primitive fears and needs, including those for safety, material well-being, self-esteem, and meaningfulness
- Ensuring that the cost of unseating the toxic leader simultaneously destroys the organization.
This necessarily incomplete list of destructive behaviors combines with various character flaws to define toxic leaders.
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