Toxic Leadership: Behaviors, Characteristics, and Consequences

Toxic leadership is a type of leadership that is destructive to members of a team, an organization, and society at large. It is ubiquitous and ever-present in a variety of settings. Yet, within the larger body of the leadership literature, toxic leadership accounts for a surprisingly small percentage of the leadership research. There are dozens of widely known and well documented cases of the devastating consequences of toxic leadership. So, why is there such little scientific interest in conceptualizing and operationalizing toxic leadership? This paper explores the multi-faceted elements of toxic leadership and reviews the behaviors, characteristics, and consequences associated with toxic leadership. The paper demonstrates what healthy leadership looks like and presents a working definition of toxic leadership. Such a working definition is vitally important to allow the academic community to build upon for further study and research.