The Roots of Toxic Leadership
Why do many toxic leaders rise to the top or cause so much damage before they’re outed
Toxic leadership, whereby leaders are destructive to their subordinates, and often their organisations, are surprisingly common. Their behaviours, many assume, stem from dysfunctional behaviours and pathologies – this is true to some extent. But there is also some surprising research to show that disrupted mental process are not all that is at play.
History is strewn with leaders who have been evil, malevolent, and lacked any moral centre. History is also strewn with leaders who have had good hearts and are kind and empathic. So, the first assumption we may have is that there are simply evil people who will do evil things. In business we will call these folk toxic leaders. They are leaders who destroy other people’s careers, lives, and show no empathy, concern for others, and lack moral guidelines.
However, some recent research shows it may not be quite so easy. Indeed, many authoritarian political leaders started off their lives as down to earth simple people who obviously believed in the good of the normal folk but as they rose through power their actions and behaviours became increasingly malevolent.
So, what was this research?
A recent piece of research by Yin et al (2021) has shone a light on how toxic behaviour can develop. They took a large cohort of individuals and gave them some business decisions to make on other people. What they ingeniously did is then manipulate their positions of power to see how this would influence behaviour.
One example of this is of those assigned to a supervisor role, a high-power role. They were asked to judge the behaviour of a subordinate or didn’t complete a task because of obvious conflicts with other tasks. What was the result?
Well, those who were assigned the supervisor position, in contrast to being a peer, or an independent observer, became less forgiving, less understanding, were harsher in their judgments, and were more willing to punish the individual.
This is a surprising and a somewhat shocking result. Shocking because previous research has focused on personality traits of those in toxic leadership and these have been considered negative traits of certain individuals. This shows that it is not the personality per se that is the influence, it is the position! They call this a Choice Mindset if you are in a position where you have choice, this means you have resources and power of some sort, you are likely to ascribe choice to others' behaviour even though they are not in a position to exert choice. This means you judge their actions more harshly.
This, I stress again, is dramatic, because this means as one moves through life one’s opinions change according to the position one is in. Wonder why conservatives in all countries, who tend to be wealthier, tend to be harsher and talk about personal choice more often? It is likely more to do with their personal situation than anything else. As an entrepreneur throughout all my life I also confess that if I look back to many of my choices and opinions, I can see them shifting according to my current fortunes and busines income.
This also explains why people who move through the system can become increasingly distanced to the issues of those below them – not intentionally or through a particularly malicious streak but through having a choice mindset - being in a privileged position distorts how one views the world and judges the actions of others.
This means leaders can become more toxic through being leaders rather than their personalities. But to stick with the topic of this issue of social factors, I will focus on some of the social factors of leadership and toxic leadership. But first let’s take a step back and understand what toxic leadership is.
If you go to the popular leadership space, we will see that the vast majority of literature is on how to be a great leader. In fact you rarely find a book or article on bad leadership only – so this article is also an outlier. The reason is the majority of people are aiming to become glorious leaders themselves. So, we want to find out what great leaders are doing – a word of warning I spoke of outcome bias in lbR 2021-04 and this is rife in leadership writing and research.
There has been work on toxic leadership and generally it does tend to generate a lot of interest - not surprisingly because many people have seen it and experienced toxic leadership. One study in military scenarios reported 80% of respondents having seen toxic leadership with 20% having had a toxic leader. Other studies have shown this varies with some saying that 8-10% of all leaders are toxic to others showing that in CEO positions up to 50% could be classed as falling into the dark triad of personality traits (narcissistic, Machiavellian, or psychopathic).
So, simply, almost everyone has seen at close hand toxic leaders, and many have experienced it first-hand. But let’s be clear first of all what toxic leadership is. And one of best and most inclusive descriptions is by Jean Lipman-Blumen
“Leaders who engage in numerous destructive behaviors and who exhibit certain dysfunctional personal characteristics. To count as toxic, these behaviors and qualities of character must inflict some reasonably serious and enduring harm on their followers and their organization.”
Of particular interest is that of damage to other individuals that are subordinates or even peers and others in the organisation not to mention potentially other stakeholders.
The characteristics supported by the literature are:
insatiable ambition
arrogance
cowardice
egotism
incompetence
lack of integrity
maladjusted
malcontent
malevolence
Now, if we focus on the social aspects of this, we can see that there is clearly reduced, or non-existent, empathy for others, either through focus on oneself or simple lack of empathy. The study we showed at the start showed that this can be magnified with positions of power and authority. The effect of having choice distorts our opinions of others and their actions. Arguably this could be magnified with some other personality traits. As we outline in our article later on the social brain, those people who are better with people have different activation patterns in their brain when dealing with people in contrast to dealing with objects – some leaders may not have this brain activation pattern. Their employees are truly just numbers and objects.
Other work into the brains of narcissists has shown that they have reduced activation in the insula – we covered the insula in lbR 2021-02. The insula embodies emotions and therefore this reduced activation shows reduced embodiment of feeling for others and a focus on one’s own feelings. Similarly, those who fall within the psychopathic spectrum have been shown to have diminished connectivity to emotional limbic regions in the brain. This all paints a picture of these traits being strongly related to various forms of lack of empathy and the prioritising of self. The most dangerous tend to be the sociopathic who can be charming and win over many people while being toxic in the background.
Brain Regions
Insula – showing lower activity related to empathy for others
Medial frontal cortex - showing little differential between people and objects
Frontal to emotional connectivity - reduced
Anterior and posterior cingulate cortex – showing less activation and therefore less cognitive reflection
The question now comes up of how do these people manage to get themselves into such leadership positions in the first place?
First, they are masterful at manoeuvring themselves into these positions because they will gladly sacrifice others to benefit themselves. Second, and a common theme, is they do get results in business, sometimes because of their toxicity and lack of empathy. However, the research shows their results are only marginally better than other good leaders, and this comes with an excessive cost in the background such as high turnover, reputation risk, and multiple other risks.
So, we can see that toxicity is driven by two elements both related to attitude to others.
Firstly, position influences one’s view of others and can cause one to be unintentionally more toxic lack insight and empathy.
Secondly, personality traits such as narcissism and psychopathy, which show a natural lack of empathy and care of relationships to others and can be measured in brain circuitry.
Now toxic leaders always argue that results are the most important thing, and they do get results. This may be true but if we look to team effectiveness, we can see that other factors are critical. Recent research I have recently written about shows for example that leaders who focus on other needs build more trust, another recent piece showed that leaders who listen to their employees and encourage learning build more effective and resilient teams, and research into collective intelligence shows that the best teams are communicative and emotionally intelligent. The list goes on and on. In short, all the behaviours that create effective, resilient, learning teams are the opposite to the toxic behaviours exhibited.
So, they may get results through their focus on results and not people, but they are making it hard for themselves and others and not building sustainable self-managing high performance.
Indeed, if we go back to our SCOAP Model we can clearly see why toxic leaders will cause damage. This also explains why high turnover of staff is a key predictor of a toxic leader.
Now so far this all make sense – we can see that toxic leaders are 1. Effective but 2. Disruptive to organisations. And their leadership style will not lead to effective resilient teams that can learn and operate independently. Of note also is that narcissistic leaders are attracted to organisations with strong hierarchies so hierarchical cultures 1. attract some of these toxic leaders and 2. may provide a suitable culture and environment to thrive because of the hierarchical nature of the business.
But just being a nice leader is also not enough and these affiliative leaders can also be ineffective. Leaders do need to give clarity, direction, hold people accountable, and drive performance. So, the difficult part is not in not being a toxic leader, but being able to tap into employees to get the best out of them for the benefit of the business – that requires skill, tact, and emotional intelligence.
This now leads us to another interesting and fascinating piece of research by Harvard. You may think that by not being toxic you are at least going to be average? Well no! What Aasland et al. found in their review of destructive leadership in 2010 is that the worst leaders were not the toxic leaders but the absent leaders (also known as laissez-faire leaders)!
Absent leaders are those leaders who are simply not present and ignore their subordinates - in this sense they are not toxic, they are not putting them down, bullying them, taking them out, micromanaging, or overworking them. No, they are simply ignoring them. Those leaders who do not guide, do not give direction, do not coach, do not give any feedback, seem to be rated the worst. Toxic leaders are indeed rated better than absent leaders, probably because you know what to do and not to cross them but can also get stuff done whether you agree with them or not. Absent leaders leave you in the lurch.
Similarly, a more recent review in 2019 by Fosse et al. showed that passive leadership was just as bad as destructive leadership and that constructive leadership, in contrast to destructive and passive leadership, correlated positively to multiple outcomes such as performance, attitude, and well-being.
So, we can see that abusing people is a bad thing for business but ignoring them is just as bad. So, to be a good leader you need to get things done, through people, and you need to engage and build trust with those people if you do that you can build solid performance, get results, and build a successful sustainable team and organisation.
So, to sum up:
Toxic leaders come in different forms but are characterised by egotism, arrogance, malevolence, and lack of integrity. This is driven by personality pathologies such as narcissism and psychopathology and can be seen in differential brain function particularly with those areas related to empathy and cognitive reflection. This can be magnified by being in leadership positions and strong hierarchies. They are good at feeding up the chain which can hide the toxicity down the chain.
Absent leaders do not engage with their employees and leave them in the dark and this according to some studies is as bad or worse than toxicity to many. Therefore, it seems that completely failing to engage employees is as bad a sin as being toxic.
Trusted leaders build relationships enable their employees but give clear direction and consistent feedback. These enable the best leadership, engagement, and wellbeing over time.
Organisations obviously would aim to have trusted leaders who can build sustainable high performance. However, the organisational structures and systems must match this. Toxic leaders can thrive in situations where no accountability is taken, the warning signs are ignored, performance is rewarded, and values aren’t.
This requires senior leadership to be trusted leaders themselves and to be able to identify and remove toxic leaders. The rewards for the organisation will be multi-fold. Not least long-term financial rewards with higher performance, lower risks, reduced absenteeism, reduced turnover, and a pipeline of talent to boot.
References
Toxic Leadership
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Dark Triad
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Brain Regions
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Trusted Leadership
Muir (Zapata), C. P., Sherf, E. N., and Liu, J. T. (2021). It’s not only what you do, but why you do it: How managerial motives influence employees’ fairness judgments. J. Appl. Psychol. doi:10.1037/apl0000898.
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Yin, Y., Savani, K., and Smith, P. K. (2021). Power Increases Perceptions of Others’ Choices, Leading People to Blame Others More. Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. doi:10.1177/19485506211016140.
Absent Leadership
Aasland, M. S., Skogstad, A., Notelaers, G., Nielsen, M. B., and Einarsen, S. (2010). The prevalence of destructive leadership behaviour. Br. J. Manag. 21. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00672.x.
Fosse, T. H., Skogstad, A., Einarsen, S. V., and Martinussen, M. (2019). Active and passive forms of destructive leadership in a military context: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Eur. J. Work Organ. Psychol. 28. doi:10.1080/1359432X.2019.1634550.
HBR The Top Complaints from Employees About Their Leaders:
https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-top-complaints-from-employees-about-their-leaders
Choice Mindset
Yin, Y., Savani, K., and Smith, P. K. (2021). Power Increases Perceptions of Others’ Choices, Leading People to Blame Others More. Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. doi:10.1177/19485506211016140.