How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes
Introduction
Traditionally, research into leadership has often been guided by the quest to find the most effective person or method to lead. Popular concepts such as transformational leadership (e.g., Bass, 1985) but even more recent developments such as ethical (e.g., Brown, Trevino, & Harrison, 2005) or authentic leadership (e.g., Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008) focus on positive leader behavior and its effects. Sometimes the term ‘leadership’ is even limited to an exercise of personal influence resulting in enthusiastic commitment of followers: “proponents of this view argue that a person who uses authority and control over rewards, punishments, and information to manipulate or coerce followers is not really ‘leading’ them” (Yukl & van Fleet, 1992: 148). However, a recent stream of research (often under the label of ‘supervision’ or ‘supervisory behavior’) acknowledges that there is also a dark side to leadership (Conger, 1990): Regardless of what researchers and practitioners may consider ideal, some leaders behave in ways that are detrimental to their followers and often the organization as a whole.
There are two main reasons for the growing interest in the dark side of leadership: First, there is the question of the prevalence of and costs as a result of destructive leaders. While Aryee, Sun, Chen, and Debrah (2008) consider abusive supervision, as the one concept that has dominated empirical research in this area, as a “low base rate phenomenon” (p. 394), other studies report a strong prevalence of destructive leader behaviors in organizations. For example in the Netherlands, Hubert and van Veldhoven (2001) report a prevalence rate of about 11%. Even higher prevalence rates have been found in a Norwegian study (Aasland, Skogstad, Notelaers, Nielsen, & Einarsen, 2010) where about a third of employees report to have been subject to some type of destructive leadership behavior “often” within the six months prior to the questioning. In the US, abusive supervision affects an estimated 13.6% of U.S. workers (Tepper, 2007) at a cost of $ 23.8 billion annually for US-companies (e.g., due to employee absenteeism, employee turnover, and lowered effectiveness; Tepper, Duffy, Henle, & Lambert, 2006). These numbers underline the high practical importance of this area of research.
The second reason for the interest in destructive leader behaviors stems from the findings that their effects on individual followers are quite severe. A large variety of outcomes have been studied in relation to destructive leadership behaviors. Examples include effects on job tension and emotional exhaustion (e.g., Harvey, Stoner, Hochwarter, & Kacmar, 2007), resistance behavior (e.g., Bamberger & Bacharach, 2006), deviant work behavior (e.g., Duffy, Ganster, & Pagon, 2002), reduced family well-being (e.g., Hoobler & Brass, 2006), and intention to quit and job satisfaction (e.g., Tepper, 2000). Both prevalence rates and potential serious effects of destructive leader behaviors make it a concept worthwhile of deeper investigation.
While for some time, a lot of literature focusing on detrimental aspects of leadership was narrative in nature (e.g., Lipman-Blumen, 2004, Sutton, 2007), making quantitative research syntheses next to impossible, research in this area has now also attracted substantial interest from quantitative researchers. Tepper (2007) stated in his qualitative literature review that most of the studies on abusive supervision have been conducted during just the last few years. Thus, the time seems ripe for a meta-analysis, quantifying the effect sizes that we can expect when leaders show destructive behaviors.
While meta-analyses already exist in the area of constructive leadership (i.e., Judge and Piccolo, 2004, Judge et al., 2004, Wang et al., 2011) as well as in the field of general workplace harassment/aggression (i.e., Bowling & Beehr, 2006), a comprehensive quantitative review of destructive leadership is still absent. To our knowledge, only Hershcovis (2011) has undertaken such an endeavor. However, her intention was to meta-analytically compare supervisor-initiated aggression to other constructs of workplace aggression. Hence, she does not give a full overview of the consequences of destructive leadership but rather focuses on some outcome variables selected based on their usefulness for this comparison. Other meta-analyses have only focused on specific aspects of destructive leadership (i.e., supervisor aggression, Hershcovis & Barling, 2010; non-contingent punishment, Podsakoff, Bommer, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006).
In summary, while there is increasing evidence that destructive leaders cause serious problems for followers, organizations and society, research in this area is lacking both an integration of the diverse concepts and a comprehensive, quantitative review of the consequences of destructive leadership. Such a review will not only provide a state-of-the-art overview of our knowledge in this area but also prospects for future theoretical and empirical developments. In fields of research like destructive leadership that are in a relatively early stage, a major problem concerns the inconsistency of the terminology (cp. Tepper, 2007). Hence, we will start by limiting the focus of our review by discussing the boundaries of destructive leadership and distinguishing it from the broader concept of destructive leader behavior. We will then discuss the different constructs of destructive leadership used in previous research to develop a definition and conclude which concepts we will include in our meta-analysis and why. Subsequently, we will briefly review prior research in this area and derive assumptions regarding the relationship between destructive leadership and different outcomes, before explaining how we conducted this meta-analysis and what the results were. We end with a discussion regarding what we know about destructive leadership so far and directions for future research.
Section snippets
Distinguishing destructive leader behavior and destructive leadership?
It is not an easy task to define destructive leadership for two main reasons. First, as already mentioned, some researchers claim that leadership can by definition only be positive (see Yukl & van Fleet, 1992). They reject the concept of destructive leadership as being an oxymoron and advocate for different terms to capture the negative side of leader behavior (e.g., supervision, management, or headship). Second, and perhaps as a consequence of this view, we see a rather scattered landscape of
Different conceptualizations and a definition: what is destructive leadership?
Even though concepts such as the negative side of charismatic leadership (often called personalized charisma, Howell, 1998) or narratives about political leaders such as Hitler or Stalin (e.g., Burns, 2003, Kellerman, 2004) have been part of the leadership discussion for a long time, the quantitative study of destructive leadership is a relatively recent one. Different conceptualizations of similar ideas have emerged almost at the same time. Examples of such conceptualizations include abusive
Sharpening the focus: what is not destructive leadership?
An important issue raised by this definition of destructive leadership is the question as to whether or not laissez-faire leadership (non-leadership) can be included as a type of destructive leadership. Skogstad, Einarsen, Torsheim, Aasland, and Hetland (2007) argue in this direction and state that destructive leadership can take both active, manifest as well as passive, indirect forms. Skogstad and colleagues (2007) underline that not only the direct forms of supervisor hostility but also a
Destructive leadership and outcomes: theoretical framework
Conducting a meta-analysis means that in terms of the constructs examined, we have to rely on research that has been conducted so far in the area for the selection of outcome variables. In reviewing the relevant literature in the field, we found that most of the outcomes of destructive leadership are assessed from a followers' point of view. Theoretically, and in line with our definition of destructive leadership, focusing on follower-related outcomes makes sense, as part of our definition is
Search strategy and inclusion/exclusion criteria
In order to identify articles to be included in the meta-analysis, we used three approaches (following procedures of other meta-analyses; cp. Judge and Piccolo, 2004, Judge et al., 2004, Hershcovis and Barling, 2010). First, we reviewed the reference list of Tepper's (2007) overview article. Second, we conducted a literature research in PsycINFO, Google Scholar, and Web of Science to identify further studies. As there is at this stage not a unitary term in use for destructive leadership, we
Results
Table 4 depicts the results of our meta-analyses. The results are very much in line with our expectations, showing that destructive leadership is negatively related to positive leader-related concepts and positively related to negative leader-related concepts, thus supporting H1. As we only found studies examining positive job-related attitudes to include in our meta-analyses, we can only in part support H2 in so far as destructive leadership is negatively related to positive job-related
Discussion
The aim of this meta-analysis was to summarize quantitatively the relationships that destructive leadership has with leader-related, job-related, organization-related, and more general person-related outcomes. One of the most interesting results of our meta-analysis is the fact that the pattern of results is not only as expected but also how narrow the confidence intervals are. This means that we can be rather confident in drawing conclusions about the expected strength and direction of the
Limitations of the study
Some limitations or our study are based in the data available from primary research. Probably the biggest drawback of our meta-analysis is that all our analyses are based on correlations. Most available research into destructive leadership is cross-sectional in nature (with the notable exception of some of Tepper's studies, e.g., Tepper et al., 2009). We, therefore, cannot draw conclusions about causal effects. In addition, studies on destructive leadership and its outcomes tend to use
Methodological suggestions for future research
Most of the studies we found are cross-sectional and mono-method. Future research should, therefore, try to collect longitudinal data to determine the direction of the relationship. It is not inconceivable that destructive leadership is a reaction of a leader towards an adverse situation in the workplace (e.g., low follower commitment, high counter-productive work behavior). Ideally, leaders would be assessed from a point in time when they first lead a team in order to examine if their
Future research and theoretical developments
The limitations of our study not only stress the importance of advancing empirical research on destructive leadership in different ways but also underline the necessity of developing a comprehensive theoretical model. While this endeavor is beyond the scope of our paper, the results of our study lead to several suggestions for future research in the area of destructive leadership and point to necessary “ingredients” of a theoretical model. The starting point for the development of a
Conclusion
In conclusion, our meta-analysis shows the expected negative effects of destructive leadership and thereby confirms the urgency for organizations to deal with prevalent destructive leadership and avoid the occurrence of destructive leadership in the first place. Some of the effect sizes we found are rather substantial, underlining the importance of leaders and leadership in organizations. In terms of the future of destructive leadership research, this meta-analysis has shown many gaps in our
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