Toxic Leadership, Destructive Leadership, and Identity Leadership: What are the Relationships and Does Follower Personality Matter?

Abstract

Integrating leadership theories and understanding the interactions between these theories is a goal for many leadership scholars. The dark side of leadership has become a topic of interest for researchers and practitioners alike in recent years. Dark leadership is likened to poison in an organization, embedding toxins in the company’s culture and instilling deep-rooted behaviors, attitudes, and actions that are a source of internal organizational decay. After viewing a brief introductory video, this article uses a cross-sectional design to investigate followers’ evaluations of a potential leader’s toxic leadership, destructive leadership, and identity leadership propensities. Relevant theory relating to identity leadership, toxic leadership, and destructive leadership constructs is reviewed and empirically tested to clarify how these topics interrelate. Most studies examining follower personality and leadership attributions have focused on positive leadership styles (e.g., transformation or transactional). This study addresses this gap in the literature in several ways. First, we examine how identity leadership is related to destructive and toxic leadership characteristics. We examine how the perceived relationship between these variables varies based on the follower’s personality, a need identified in previous studies. Further, this study contributes to Pelletier’s (2012) discussion of the lack of research that considers leader-follower relationships in the context of the dark side of leadership. Specifically, to clarify the influence of followers’ evaluations, the role of follower personality is explored as a moderating variable. These results support research from others showing that personality affects the interpretation of leadership actions. However, the current study extends this notion to show that even a short period of contact with the leader allows followers to make judgements about the leader.