Re-thinking Destructive Leadership

Good human resource managers identify aggressive and abusive people in their organization, and either work to adjust their behaviour, or terminate their employment. Merely catching abuse, however, misses a huge chunk of destructive leadership styles.

A new study in the British Journal of Management re-frames the traditional view of leadership by adding a second dimension. While previous models evaluated leadership on scales from “low to high,” or “bad to good,” the new model considers leadership from two perspectives: that of the organization, and that of the leader’s subordinates. The results are surprising.

Data collected from a representative population of over 2,500 people showed that destructive leadership manifests in many different ways, and is very common. By clustering results, the researchers found that a whopping 61% of people are “sometimes” or “often” exposed to destructive leadership. Only 6% of people had supervisors that were “highly abusive”—these are the problematic managers typically identified in complaints and internal gossip.

That leaves 55% of workers with immediate supervisors whose unaddressed leadership issues include:

• Unavailability (eg. “likely to be absent when needed” and “avoids making decisions”).

• Supportive of staff but disloyal to the company (eg. “encourages you to run private errands during working time” and “encourages you to take extra coffee/cigarette breaks as a reward for good work effort”).

• Destructiveness (eg. “regards staff more as competitors than as collaborators” and “humiliates you if you fail to live up to their standards”).

• Some combination of the above.

Identifying and responding to destructive but subtle styles of leadership, which are much more common than previously understood, should be a priority for leading human resource practitioners. Doing so effectively will reduce turnover, improve morale, increase productivity, and optimize budgets.

Good for the organization and good for subordinates? Eliminating poor leadership practices reflects highly on you as a constructive leader in your company. You’ll be thanked.

You can access the study for free online. What do you think? Does this new model of leadership match your experience?

Source: Aasland, M.S. et. al. "The Prevalence of Destructive Leadership Behaviour." British Journal of Management 21. 438-452. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00672.x