BUS603: Managing People

Leadership is one of the most important relationships in the workplace and the way leaders give direction, assign tasks, and handle conflict has a strong influence on followers. With this, it becomes particularly important to consider what social research refers to as "negativity bias". In a seminal article famously titled "Bad is Stronger than Good," Baumeister cites extensive evidence showing that bad events and interactions "have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good". To account for this phenomenon, Baumeister draws on evolutionary selection: in order to survive threats, it was important for organisms to recognize and remember negative information more strongly than positive. As a consequence, negative information has greater emotional and motivational significance. This has important implications for the study of destructive leadership, since destructive leaders should therefore have a strong influence on followers' emotional state and their motivation to act.

Related to this, more recent research indicates that there is a significant difference between how we generally process positive versus negative information. Unkelbach describes this in the density hypothesis. They argue that information is generally perceived as more similar to other positive information compared to negative information's similarity to other negative information (i.e., negative information is perceived as more dissimilar to other negative information). Thus, while destructive leadership generally impacts followers more strongly, followers may also be very sensitive to the unique features of different destructive leader behaviors.

Against this backdrop, a great deal of attention has been given to the nature and processes of destructive leadership over the last 15 years. Different definitions and constructs of destructive leadership exist, all describing different behaviors. The most widely researched construct is abusive supervision. This refers to repeated hostile and aggressive yet nonphysical behaviors toward followers. One of the most recent constructs describes a more prevalent form: exploitative leadership refers to genuinely self-interested leader behaviors, such as using followers for personal gain and taking credit for followers' work. Other researchers have pointed to destructive leader behaviors such as accepting bribes, stealing, or making personal use of company property.

In short, the literature on destructive leadership describes a multitude of different constructs. At the same time, efforts have been made to integrate and organize these different approaches. In the present work, we follow the seminal taxonomy provided by Einarsen, who describe destructive leadership behavior along two dimensions: destructive leader behaviors targeting the followers versus destructive behaviors that target the organization. This distinction is well established and commonly used when it comes to organizing empirical evidence on destructive leadership. In addition, we follow the work of Schyns and Schilling, who concluded that the core of destructive leadership lies in the hostile or hindering nature of the leader's behavior. They defined destructive leadership as "a process in which over a longer period of time the activities, experiences and/or relationships of an individual or the members of a group are repeatedly influenced by their supervisor in a way that is perceived as hostile and/or obstructive".

Taken together, these two aspects (i.e., the target of behavior and the level of hostility) offer a useful basis for differentiating constructs. Cross-tabulation of the two dimensions results in four theoretical destructive leadership behavior categories, as shown in Figure 1. The underlying rationale for these categories is presented below.