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This chapter explores leadership failure by way of performance appraisal. A series of experiences in two different organizations with two different managers is examined through the lens of four critical performance appraisal mistakes – lack of objectivism (assessment based upon own experiences, beliefs and expectations), freshness (relying on recent events with little consideration for past behavior), causal attribution (flawed interpretation of employee behavior) and first impression (assessment based upon something learned from early introduction to employee, often the first encounter) These mistakes represent a continuum of infractions for which ethical leadership is offered as an antidote. Ethical leadership strategies are provided to support employees, managers, teams, and organizations in counteracting, avoiding, surviving and eliminating these mistakes, respectively.

If any organization wants to be globally recognized leadership plays an important role. This chapter deals with the leadership failure in creating good salesperson behavior in India’s pharmaceutical industry. There are four types of salesperson’s behavior: selling orientation, customer orientation, adaptive selling, and unethical selling. Selling oriented and unethical selling behaviors negatively impact customer trust and customer value, while customer orientation and adaptive are more positive. This chapter explores how senior managers can create good organization culture and organization climate by creating positive sales behavior. This chapter will be an eye opener to many first-line managers for helping their salespersons to practice customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior.

Encountering a toxic workplace is almost inevitable. Here, the author shares an experience by describing some of the behaviors of toxic leaders and followers as an example of leadership failure. The story takes place in an organization with a self-serving leader who is contributing to retention issues, exerting power dominance, and operating in a divisive manner. Influencing followers through the use of deceptive practices and manipulation that leads to problems with trust are revealed. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned and a reference list.

This chapter combines new and emerging perspectives on career mentoring in the workplace and its role in failed leadership practice from instigated incivility to manipulative mentoring. While numerous scholarly and practitioner-based works on the topic of mentoring, few have offered the perspective of leaders who facilitate failed mentoring dynamics and its effect on employee subgroups, such as millennials. Based on leadership research, theory, and first-hand experience, this author will share through anecdotal evidence, with a diversity-theme focus on women and millennials, a group that comprises 58 million individuals currently working in corporate positions in the United States (Toosei, 2008) As more millennials join the workplace, professional mentoring plays a significant role in their progress. This research reveals the role that career mentoring can play, when harnessed incorrectly, as a hindrance to the promise and potential of entry-level employees, particularly millennials. The author’s perspective frames this chapter in personal narrative, as she recounts her tale as a Black, female academician and practitioner upon whose own professional trajectory the story of failed mentorship will be loosely based.

The author lasted a whopping 10 months as a Site Manager for an authoritative micro-managing Executive Director that consistently went back and forth on decision-making. “Do this … I didn’t say to do that … Make decisions … Clear all decisions with me first …. Why are you asking me about making a decision?” Her head swung back and forth faster than watching a ping-pong tournament. Other department managers would go to her to vent their frustrations on the same exact issue with the Executive Director. So how do you manage an authoritative micro-manager? How do you deal with yo-yo decision-making? It wasn’t until after leaving the organization and recovering from the stress of the whole ordeal that she broke everything down and created a better solution than the one used. This lesson on leadership failure starts by detailing the 10 months of stress torture. The author endured with details about the types of leadership styles used, and what could have helped on an individual level. Even if a person is not the designated leader of the organization, she can still be the better example of how to lead. This lesson concludes with the outcome of her 10-month torture and how it made her a better leader today.

This chapter illustrates the consequences that can result from a mismatch between leadership style and organizational contexts required to encourage genuine investigation and exploration – particularly in topical areas relevant to the enterprise’s business model. This cautionary tale suggests not only that leadership approaches need to complement the necessary conceptual challenges involved in rigorously defining relevant problems and strategies in order to sustain organizational success; ideally, it should also align with the strengths and goals of the teams led. Thus, a senior marketing, communication and sales leader may not support the creative research and evidence-based, user-centered design necessary to nurture innovation within, for example, a future-oriented research and development team. Such cultural misalignments have been well framed by classical theories of leadership as well as by empirical comparisons of enduringly successful companies with more transient corporations.