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Leaders have a profound impact on the work lives of the employees they supervise. This chapter explores the experiences of employees whose leaders exhibit toxic behaviors and the impact of this toxicity on employee engagement. The authors report the findings of a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with 13 participants. First, the authors describe the participants’ experiences before and after experiencing toxicity. Next, the authors outline three critical toxic leadership styles: the nightmare (leaders who have unbalanced emotional control and who are overly fond of power), the pretender (leaders whose authenticity and integrity seem low, who play different characters depending on the circumstances), and the runaround (leaders who change directions too often or give unclear instructions). Finally, the authors address organizational, leadership, and individual strategies to identify and remove toxic leaders from the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to study gender-based differences in information-processing impact on message perception, leading to women viewing the behavior of potentially toxic leaders more negatively than they are viewed by men.

In total, 381 participants completed a series of measures of cue recognition items, collusion and conformity pertaining to a hypothetical toxic leadership scenario.

Results indicated that women perceived the toxic leader more negatively than men, elaborating more on negative message connotations, while men emphasized positives. Likewise, men recorded higher scores on their tendency to collude with the toxic leader compared to women. Evidence was also found that participants were more attuned to negative messages and behavior from a leader of the same gender.

The Anglo-Celtic dominance of the sample is identified as a potential limitation. Further research exploring how not only gender, but age and cultural differences impact on how leaders are perceived is also proposed.

From a management standpoint understanding that men and women process information differently has worth in assisting in organizations more effectively structuring their intra-organizational communications. Gender-specific communications may help to offset perceptions of negativity toward leaders.

This study is the first to consider how gender-based information-processing differences may influence whether a leader is perceived as toxic by male and female followers. It also suggests that gender interaction effects may be critical when considering how leaders, particularly toxic leaders, are viewed by employees.

In an article entitled “Identifying and combating organizational leadership toxicity,” authors Watt, Javidi, and Normore (Watt, Javidi, & Normore, 2015) identified and outlined techniques for combating leadership toxicity in Law Enforcement. This chapter extends this work by linking Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) to toxic leadership. Crisis happens. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), (a term) coined at the Army War College in the early 1990s (Mack, O., Kare, A., Kramer, A., & Burgartz, T. (2015), Managing VUCA world. New York, NY. Retrieved from http://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/2015/12/02/capturing-the-moment-counter-vuca-leadership-for-21st-century-policing/#sthash.IKYJInr4.dpuf), is a sobering new reality for leaders and the organizations they serve. In simple terms, VUCA is chaos. It falls on leaders to understand it, prepare for it, and minimize the disruptive and destabilizing effects of it.

Military officers and government officials have a duty to serve selflessly, without personal bias or favoritism, demonstrating effectiveness and the efficient use of resources for the safety, security and thriving of the people. However, some abuse subordinates for personal or professional gain. The purpose of this paper is to discuss toxic leadership, its cost, effects and impact and provides recommendations for prevention and intervention.

Based on survey research of a convenience sample of military and federal government students at the National Defense University, the paper does not allow for generalizability, but presents patterns and trends in descriptive statistics.

The sample of 186 reported an average of 2.9 toxic leaders in an average of 18.3 years of service. Student observations of the most toxic leader they served identified high prevalence of all toxic behaviors with the most prevalent being a lack of self-awareness, a negative interpersonal style, suspicion of others, passive hostility, defensiveness, refusal to allow dissent and shaming and blaming. The frequency and degree of impact on targets, witnesses, and teams of toxic leadership were significant, especially in avoidance, worry, and decreased contribution, motivation and productivity.

These results indicate that toxic leadership degrades military performance and readiness and government efficiency. Organizations can effectively address toxic leadership through purposeful, cultural reinforcement and leader development, increasing efficiency and reducing waste.

Although civilian and public research exists, this is the first and only such research in the military and federal government and lays a foundation for further study of these organizations.

Leadership has been known for its tremendous impact on employees' outcomes in any organisation. Constructive leadership positively impacts employees, while destructive leadership causes counterproductive work behaviours (CWB). This study aims to investigate the effect of toxic leadership on employees' CWB via the role of turnover intention by employing the psychological contract theory.

The participants were recruited using various recruitment methods such as online recruitment and alumni networks. After dropping some participants who failed to complete the three-wave data collection procedure, 457 responses were used for the final data analysis. The participants came from various public organisations in Indonesia (e.g. hospitals).

The results found that the effect of toxic leadership on employees' CWB was mediated by the role of turnover intention. Under a toxic leader, employees might intend to leave the organisations and commit CWB as the employees perceived the psychological contract breach.

Firstly, public organisations should implement some strategies to reduce the emergence of toxic behaviours. Secondly, public organisations should evaluate and examine how leadership is exercised within public organisations. Lastly, the organisations must ensure that their leaders do not breach employees' psychological contracts.

This study has highlighted the effect of toxic leadership on CWB in public service organisations by employing a psychological contract theory and a power distance perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a relationship between pay satisfaction and leader–member relationship and examine pay satisfaction as a moderator of the relationship between toxic leadership and LMX among public sector nurses in Ghana.

Using a cross-sectional survey approach, the authors used questionnaires to collect data from 225 nurses working in public hospitals in Ghana. The hypotheses were tested using covariance-based structural equation modelling.

The results of this study revealed that pay satisfaction levels of nurses had an influence on leader–member exchange (LMX). The results further showed that pay satisfaction as a moderator of the relationship between toxic leadership and LMX was not statistically significant.

Cross-sectional surveys are often criticised for causality issue. The causality issue here is that the link between toxic leadership, pay satisfaction and LMX was explored at a given point in time and ignores changes through time.

Hospitals must encourage their leaders to demonstrate more supportive and positive behaviours to foster positive leader–member relationships. Maladjusted, malcontent and malevolent leadership behaviours are dangerous for nurses and hospitals and can be addressed through leadership training and development.

Toxic leadership has considerable organisational costs of low productivity and negative work relationship at the workplace. The indirect effects of toxic leadership at the workplace on employees’ families and friends are often silent in organisations.

Nurses have been ignored in toxic leadership research in emerging economies. LMX is extended to examine toxic leadership and pay satisfaction in public hospitals in an emerging economy.

In a nutshell, the purpose of this paper is to accentuate the mask of evils of the organization by discussing different experiences, stories and cases, which is on itself a bizarre because we always talk about the morality and ethos in leading styles.

The study is conducted in India and descriptive in nature. The structural equation modelling technique is used in the paper to test the relationships among the constructs directly and indirectly by mediation effect on how it raises the organizational deviance.

The outcome of the study indicates that organizational deviance is highly influenced by narcissism, which also raises the toxic work culture and abusive supervision. The mentioned variables not only have a significant effect but also have a partial mediation effect on organizational deviance. The study significantly contributes to the literature with the findings that not only narcissism led to organizational deviance but additionally leads to high arousal through a positive relationship with toxic work culture and abusive supervision strongly leading to organizational deviance.

The study is for leaders who are more with self-love, demolishing peace and promoting the toxic work culture and deviant behaviours.

Having narcissistic traits then turns into a complicated situation for employees to decide whether to stay in the organization or leave, and if these intentions are not developing, then it led to deviance on the part of employees.

A leader becomes so much obsessed with their egomania and uses the abusive supervision to dominate the team members. This pattern has to stop, as it fabricating the wrong connotation of the tranquillity of followers or team members.

This study contributes to the outcome where leaders could understand the impact of how their excess self-love turns against the workplace peace and results in high deviance.

Toxic leadership is often studied from a leader-centric perspective, which focuses on the detrimental outcomes of leaders with destructive ideas and practices. In this chapter, we provide a global value chain (GVC) perspective, which accounts for effects of corporate leadership from inception of a product or service idea to its consumption across the value chain. In particular, we demonstrate how toxic leadership is sustained through an illusio, i.e., the allure of the often-charismatic leadership discourse, which is rendered unaccountable due to lack of global regulation of GVCs. This allows for global organizations and toxic leaders to exploit weaknesses in national-level regulation. Drawing on a netnographic study of toxic leadership in Amazon, we demonstrate how toxic leadership created the illusion of success while perpetuating toxicity and exploitation across their complex value chains internationally.

This chapter reviews ethical challenges confronting nonprofit administration in relation to organizational managerial practices and leadership behaviors. Through a theoretical model of nonprofit-specific toxic leadership, it reviews the dynamics of destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments in cases of unethical and corrupt nonprofit organizational behaviors. It provides a case for prioritizing oversight responsibilities of the board of directors, board supervision, promoting ethical culture in organizational leadership, and implementing policies for addressing destructive and corrupt nonprofit leaders. It reflects on how nonprofit toxic leadership primarily erodes public trust in the nonprofit sector and concludes with practical recommendations for recentering positive behaviors congruent with the nonprofit's social and public good mission.

The term “destructive leadership” has been utilized as an overarching expression to refer to various “bad” leader behaviors thought to be associated with damaging outcomes for followers and organizations. Yet, there is a recognition in the broader leadership literature that leadership involves much more than the behaviors of leaders. It is a dynamic, cocreational process that unfolds between leaders, followers, and environments, the product of which results in group outcomes. In this chapter, I argue that in order to achieve a more balanced view on destructive leadership, it is vital to develop more integrative approaches that are grounded in the contemporary leadership discourse and that recognize flawed or toxic leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments as interdependent elements of a broader destructive leadership process. To this end, I provide a critique of the extant literature, propose a broader definition of destructive leadership, and discuss strategies to examine destructive leadership in a broader, holistic manner.