A toxic leader is someone who has responsibility over a group of people or an organization, and who abuses the leader-follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse-off condition than when s/he first found them. The phrase was coined by Marcia Whicker in 1996 and is linked with a number of dysfunctional leadership styles.
Lipman-Blumen
In her book, “The Allure of Toxic Leaders : Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians–and How We Can Survive Them “, Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen explains that there is a tendency among contemporary society to seek authoritative, even dominating characteristics among our corporate and political leaders because of our own psychosocial needs.
For Lipman-Blumen “toxic leadership” is not about run-of-the-mill mismanagement. Rather, it refers to leaders, who, by virtue of their “dysfunctional personal characteristics” and “destructive behaviors” “inflict reasonably serious and enduring harm” not only on their own followers and organizations, but on others, as well. A rule of thumb suggests that toxic leaders leave their followers and others who come within their sphere of influence worse off than they found them. In business, these are the people who, for personal gain and aggrandizement, unapologetically destroy the companies they are hired to lead; who cook the books to inflate stock prices, use insider information to sell their own shares just days or hours before exchange regulations would make them culpable for doing so; who raid company pension funds as if they were a private treasury. In politics, these are the people for whom no malevolent act is out of bounds in the name of gaining and holding power; who sell access to the highest bidders; who pursue policies that abjectly favor the investment class while maintaining a populist rhetoric and scolding others for raising issues of class warfare; and who take us into prolonged and unwinnable wars on the basis of flimsy and false intelligence hyped to appear as solid information.
Lipman-Blumens’ core focus is on investigating why people will continue to follow and remain loyal to toxic leaders. She explores why followers often vigorously resist change and challenges to leaders who have clearly violated the leader/follower relationship and abused their power as leaders to the direct detriment of the people they are leading. Lipman-Blumen suggests there is something of a deeply psychological nature going on. She argues the need to feel safety, specialness and community all help explain this phenomenon.
Kellerman
In “Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters,” Barbara Kellerman (2004) suggests that toxicity in leadership (or simply, “bad leadership”) may be analyzed into seven different types:
- Incompetent – the leader and at least some followers lack the will or skill (or both) to sustain effective action. With regard to at least one important leadership challenge, they do not create positive change.
- Rigid – the leader and at least some followers are stiff and unyielding. Although they may be competent, they are unable or unwilling to adapt to new ideas, new information, or changing times.
- Intemperate – the leader lacks self-control and is aided and abetted by followers who are unwilling or unable to effectively intervene.
- Callous – the leader and at least some followers are uncaring or unkind. Ignored and discounted are the needs, wants, and wishes of most members of the group or organization, especially subordinates.
- Corrupt – the leader and at least some followers lie, cheat, or steal. To a degree that exceeds the norm, they put self-interest ahead of the public interest.
- Insular – the leader and at least some followers minimize or disregard the health and welfare of those outside the group or organization for which they are directly responsible.
- Evil – the leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm can be physical, psychological or both.
Kellerman’s study proposes to shed light on aspects of bad leadership so that we can understand, identify and hopefully prevent instances of bad leadership.
Terry Price
In “Understanding Ethical Failures in Leaders,” Price argues that the volitional account of moral failures in leaders do not provide a complete account of this phenomenon. Some have suggested that the reason leaders misbehave ethically is because they willingly go against what they know to be wrong. Professor Terry L. Price however, offers an alternative analysis of leaders who excuse themselves from normally applicable moral requirements. He argues that a cognitive account for ethical failures in leaders provides a better analysis of the issues involved in all the ethical conundrums under the rubric of “toxic leadership”. Leaders can know that a certain kind of behavior is generally required by morality but still be mistaken as to whether the relevant moral requirement applies to them in a particular situation and whether others are protected by this requirement. Price demonstrates how leaders make exceptions of themselves, explains how the justificatory force of leadership gives rise to such exception-making, and develops normative protocols that leaders should adopt.