Research pick: Don’t you know that you’re toxic? - "The dark side of organisation identification: systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis on toxic leadership on employee’s behaviour"

A comprehensive literature review in the International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking sheds light on research into the notion of toxic leadership and how this increasingly pervasive issue affects the workplace and can damage organisations.

Emily Maria K. Jose and Bijay Prasad Kushwaha of the Vellore Institute of Technology, India, used a systematic approach to extract relevant research articles from a scholarly database. Their analysis of these papers revealed five principal characteristics of toxic leadership: authoritarian leadership, abusive supervision, narcissism, unpredictability, and maladjustment. Their findings highlight the nature of toxic leadership but also point to how it can affect employee engagement, performance, and retention.

Toxic leadership is defined as management behaviour that is ultimately harmful to both employees and the company for which they work. Toxic leaders are commonly indifferent to employee well-being and prioritize self-interest. The result is the creation of a working environment filled with fear and instability. The current review suggests that common toxic behaviour affects individual employees but also propagates through the corporate culture and so can affect an organisation deeply.

Jose and Kushwaha found that toxic leadership leads to high employee turnover rates. Indeed, almost three quarters of employees faced with toxic leadership will contemplate leaving their jobs. High staff turnover leads to a loss of team cohesion and other negative effects that will eventually have financial repercussions for the company if not remedied. Research suggests that toxic leadership can lead to almost a third of business failures each year.

The study discusses psychological safety and employee engagement, both of which can be affected negatively by toxic leadership. In a toxic work environment, employees become disenfranchised, which leads to a fall in their productivity and a deterioration of their work-life balance. A vicious cycle of dissatisfaction then feeds the toxic culture still further. There is thus a critical need for organisations to recognize and address this potentially destructive problem more proactively now than ever before. Effective coaching, constructive feedback, and monitoring should be key to mitigating the risks associated with toxic leadership behaviour, the research suggests.

Jose, E.M.K. and Kushwaha, B.P. (2024) ‘The dark side of organisation identification: systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis on toxic leadership on employee’s behaviour’, Int. J. Process Management and Benchmarking, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp.240–265.