Toxic leadership. Disguised and common in your organization?

Veldsman (2016) describes toxic leadership as “ongoing, deliberate, intentional actions by a leader to undermine the sense of dignity, self-worth, and efficacy of an individual. This results in exploitative, destructive, devaluing and demeaning work experiences.” 

Toxic leadership is a mix of narcissistic states of mind, and practices that affect subordinates, the organization, and undermine the reaching of objectives. A toxic leader works with an amplified feeling of self-esteem and from extreme self-interest. Toxic leaders regularly use dysfunctional behaviors to deceive, subtly threatening, pressure, or unethically punish others to get what they want for themselves. This type of leader put the last touches to subordinates assignments by working at the bottom of the continuum of obligation. This work approach may attain results in the short term, but disregards others attitude to leads and develop. Lengthy use of negative leadership affect followers and weakens the members’ determination, resourcefulness, and notably, destroys team morale. Employment performance, generally assessed in a classical top-down design, allows toxic leadership to persist. Adopting a bottom-up assessment technique that empowers subordinates to evaluate their superiors is helpful in highlighting dysfunctions; however, often team members witness a lack of action on results and a lack of transparency on the purpose of such assessments.

Very often, a toxic leadership demonstrates no attempt to develop subordinates. Counseling as a whole is typically absent. Followers are rarely encouraged or counseled on how they are doing until it is time for their yearly performance review. Only then, subordinates shortcomings or mistakes are pointed out. This creates the condition where team members are unable to correct slip-ups or weaknesses but have to face those issues when they end up on subordinates' evaluations.

Fortunately, we can likely concur that toxic leadership does not require intentionality; through a lapse in oversight, and poor management it quickly takes roots. Poor hiring, rank inadequacy, and basic ineptness breed a bad leadership quality. Thus, followers experience dissatisfaction where managers do nothing. In essence, a toxic leadership is quickly eradicated when there is an organization will, active supervision and a clear vision for team building. Perhaps, there is no need of drastic action through dismissal; however, through management training, proficient improvement projects, and mentorship programs, we can altogether diminish the number of leaders that are poisonous for an organization.