Toxic Leadership Essay

In such organizations it is common for leaders to provide direction without concern for subordinates disagreeing or providing negative feedback. A second behavior which often leads to exploitation is consolidation of information. When a few select personnel in a firm have restricted access to valuable information, a toxic leader can leverage this situation to great effect. Information control can be used to enact isolation for dissenters or to reward those who support the leader. Toxic leaders can even use information to foment distrust among sections of the business preventing them from being galvanized in opposition (Wilson-Starks, 2003). Access itself becomes a commodity which is carefully regulated by the leader. Possessing such control is intoxicating to such a leader and will be readily used to solidify his or her power base and to ensure importance (Seago, 2016). A final behavior which toxic leaders leverage is power concentration. Such an individual amasses great influence throughout the organization and then crushes dissidents through threats of being fired or by public

Identification of precursors to toxic behavior is essential because it is much harder to make a course correction after such actions become established in an individual’s leadership style (Calderon, 2017). At risk leaders can be steered away from further development of such behaviors when a firm deliberately observes them for misbehavior and provides retraining if precursors are found. Probing for toxic behavior is beneficial in a proactive sense because it dissuades individuals from partaking in such actions even if they are not morally opposed to their practice. For example, when a manager knows that his or her resource expenditure is subject to periodic audits, he or she will be considerably less likely to inappropriately use them for personal gain (Seago,