Toxic Leadership Supporting Information

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To help facilitate your project, I will put together some notes that you can use regarding toxic leadership. I will also include a list of academic journals and books at the end of the posting.

Toxic leadership is a term used to define an organizational situation where a leader abuses his position of authority. His departure from the organization results in a situation that was worse prior to his arrival.

Due to the destructiveness of toxic leadership, the first step in managing this issue is to identify its symptoms. Toxic leaders are those who bully, threaten, and yell. They usually display significant mood swings, and those swings dictate the progress of the day. They can be malicious, according to Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee (2002), and will have no problem putting their interests ahead of everyone else's even if this causes harm to the other individual. Furthermore, identifying toxic leaders can be accomplished through their treatment of superiors (Hughes et al. 2009). They are usually friendly and articulate towards superiors, but the opposite with colleagues and subordinates. They do not feel they need to part of a team, nor do they feel they are obliged to participate in any team building or culture building activities. According to Cunningham (1979), they are seen by the majority of subordinates in a negative light, normally as arrogant, self-serving, petty, and inflexible. The problem with toxic leaders is that their behavior is not isolated, but rather, can have long reaching effects around the organization, and can affect employee behavior and motivation, as well as contribute to areas of conflict.

According to Borgelt and Falk (2007), most toxic leaders lead by fear, causing a sense of hate and disklike by followers. Fear of losig their job or being reprimanded for insobordinatation can cause such hate to increase leading to high levels of stress and conflict. One of the most predominant conflicts that can happen are personality clashes. Those involve a strong utilization of emotion ...