Toxic Leadership

Models have been drawn up and articles published depicting what good leadership is supposed to look like; what effective leadership is supposed to look like. There have even been leadership models dealing with followers, who are often ignored in the leadership equation. What is even more rarely mentioned though, are the signs of bad leadership, or “Toxic Leadership”. Toxic Leadership isn’t just having a lousy leader who really doesn’t inspire, but still somehow manages to get the job done; Toxic Leadership is harmful to both followers and the organization involved.
In theories on Toxic Leadership, certain attributes that go along with that toxicity have been noted. These attributes range from not horrifically harmful, such as incompetence, to those truly harmful characteristics that would be terrifying to behold in a leader, such as malevolence. I have never encountered malevolence in any of my leaders, and hopefully I never will, but I have most surely come across incompetence! For instance, back in High School, in my Junior English class, we were all divided up into groups at the beginning of the year, and then instructed to work on a research project for the remainder of the semester. My group was composed of fairly competent and hardworking individuals, except for the person who arose as our “leader”. She (I won’t name names) was a decent student overall, and someone I in general liked, but she was incompetent as far as being a leader goes. She was incompetent in the sense that she had the will and the strong personality to be a leader, but she never actually figured out how to go about it. She failed at organizing us, and relied on myself and others to make important group decisions. And she displayed other characteristics of a toxic leader, such as irresponsibility. For instance, she never accepted blame for any mistakes, not even when they were legitimately hers. She would set us off in one direction on this project (it was about internet privacy laws) but when the plan failed, she would never take any blame herself.
Why did we continually look to this girl when we all saw how she failed as a leader? For both Internal-Psychological reasons and for Internal-Pragmatic reasons. Internal-Psychological reasons are such things as the need for an authority figure, someone who gives us direction as someone who supposedly knows best. As a group, we needed a driving force, and the person who stepped up to that role was this girl, and since no one else in the group was relishing the idea of taking on more work, we continued to follow this girl’s lead. Internal-Pragmatic reasons are reasons that fill a physical need, like paying the bills or putting food on the table. As a group, we wanted a good grade, and the best way to get a good grade on this project was to work collaboratively. Although this girl was a terrible leader, she was still the glue that kept us working as a team toward a common goal, as opposed to what we would have done, which is work separately and put all of our work together at the end. And in the end, we did get a good grade, even if it was a struggle to get there.