The Dark Side of the Leadership: The Effects of Toxic Leaders on Employees

Abstract

Studies on leadership have been overwhelmingly focused on the positive aspects of leadership, and tried to reach certain conclusions on the positive effects of leadership in organizations. However, the dark side of leadership has been ignored. Those negative leadership styles in general, toxic leadership, in particular, may have extremely negative effects on organizations, which have the potential to overshadow the effects of positive leadership. Toxic leadership can create a decrease in workplace performance, productivity, and output, as well as its remarkable negative reflections on employees. So, examining the outputs of toxic leadership is inevitable. In this paper, we aim to examine the consequences of toxic leaders on employees by a quantitative search on the finance industry.