Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Four definitional elements of toxic leadership

From the preceding discussion above, we can determine that destructive leadership involves four definitional ingredients.³³ These describe what destructive leadership is; the toxic triangle itself identifies the leader, follower, and environmental elements that make the toxic outcomes possible.

1. Destructive leadership is about more than the leader: Most research on destructive leadership, like leadership more broadly, is leader-centric and the roles of followers and environmental contexts do not receive adequate attention. Destructive organizational outcomes also depend on susceptible followers and conducive environments.
2. Destructive leadership is rarely entirely destructive: Most leadership situations have both desirable and undesirable outcomes. Outcomes associated with destructive leadership are found primarily at the negative end of that spectrum.
3. Destructive leadership involves control and coercion rather than persuasion and commitment and has a selfish orientation. It focuses on a leader's objectives and goals, as opposed to those of constituents and the larger social organization. Efforts to maintain a destructive leader's regime (often through force) preclude developing, empowering, and involving followers.
4. Effects of destructive leadership result in bad consequences for the group, upsetting the wellbeing of followers, whether internal or external to the organization. Negative organizational outcomes are the product of dysfunctional ...