Toxic Leadership Behaviors
Can you just help me spin my old assignment into this new one!
A. Describe three toxic leadership behaviors that a leader could exhibit, including a specific example of each toxic leadership behavior.
Note: Where examples are asked for in this assessment, you may use hypothetical or real-world examples, as long as all identifying information is removed from any real-world examples used.
1. Explain how each of the toxic leadership behaviors could influence leadership effectiveness and organizational culture, including two specific examples of how the toxic leadership behaviors have influenced leadership effectiveness and organizational culture.
2. Explain how each of the toxic leadership behaviors could have ethical consequences for leadership effectiveness, including two specific examples of a situation in which a toxic leadership behavior had ethical consequences for leadership effectiveness.
3. Spport your responses for parts A, A1, and A2 with a scholarly source.
Note: A scholarly source is defined as an academic journal article from a peer-reviewed source, an editor-reviewed article or book, or an article from a respected industry publication, government organization, educational institution, or industry leader. Reputable sources can also be found in the WGU library or within the course.
B. Recommend three action items to prevent the toxic leadership behaviors described in part A.
1. Explain how these action items can prevent negative consequences of the toxic leadership behaviors within an organization, including specific examples of how each action item would prevent the negative consequences (three total examples).
2. Explain how these action items improve leadership effectiveness and organizational culture in terms of motivation, development, or innovation.
3. Support your responses to parts B, B1, and B2 with a scholarly source.
C. Analyze how power and influence are used to achieve organizational goals by doing the following:
1. Explain how positive leadership behaviors help an organization achieve its goals.
2. Explain how toxic leadership behaviors inhibit an organization’s ability to achieve its goals.
3. Support your responses to parts C1 and C2 with a scholarly source.
Toxic Leadership Behaviors
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Toxic Leadership Behaviors
Toxic leadership behaviors are destructive to team members and have adverse consequences in the workplace. Indeed, it refers to power abuse by the leader, which makes it challenging for members to work together and achieve the set objectives. A toxic leadership might lead to workplace bullying, burnout, depression, psychological distress, job dissatisfaction, and counterproductive work behaviors. Notably, a toxic leader is an obstacle to leadership effectiveness and organizational culture. The paper discusses toxic leadership behaviors that might be exhibited by leaders, recommend proper actions to prevent toxic leadership behaviors, and how power and influence can be used to achieve established organizational goals.
Part A
The three primary toxic leadership behaviors are arrogance, discrimination against employees, and the failure to listen to workers’ feedback. An example of an arrogant leader entails someone who prioritizes self-interests, alienates, diminishes, or disengages others, is hot-tempered, does not have emotional intelligence, and believes that an individual is better than others in everything, hence no need to grow, change, or learn. In addition, the person has a high likelihood to discriminate against others based on their capabilities, talents, skin color, race, culture, and ethnicity. A toxic leader usually brings other people down since one believes that he or she has the power and influence to undermine followers. Another example of toxic leadership behavior is the lack of listening keenly to feedback. Team members led by a toxic leader face problems, and their complaints are unheard, which gives no room for improvement since a toxic leader hates positive or negative criticisms, particularly from his or her juniors or followers.
Toxic leadership behaviors significantly influence organizational culture and leadership effectiveness. In particular, organizational culture refers to practices, values, and expectations that inform and guide employees within a firm. For instance, arrogance hinders leadership effectiveness since the individual does not want to be criticized, making it difficult to understand and address issues that hinder workers’ productivity and efficiency. In other words, employees stick to misleading values, beliefs, and practices, which lead to negative outcomes (Matos, O’Neill, & Lei, 2018). Discriminating against employees is an obstacle to leadership effectiveness since such people will always feel left out and cannot concentrate or perform their duties optimally. Such workers might engage in behaviors that are discouraged by the organizational culture. In addition, another example of how toxic leadership behaviors influence organizational culture and leadership effectiveness is the failure of improving things since the leader does not listen actively to team members. That way, it becomes challenging for potential problems to be prevented since even after workers predict them, it is difficult for them to communicate with their leader to get an appropriate solution. As a result, employees remain silent, and they suffer from issues that are preventable but due to toxic leadership behaviors, the leader diminishes such problems.
Toxic leadership behaviors can have ethical consequences for leadership effectiveness. For instance, an arrogant leader might harass employees who present potential problems since the individual does not want to be challenged in any way. The leader might abuse a worker or treat the person without respect or dignity. Additionally, the individual might discriminate against employees, leading to ethical consequences of the abuse of power and influence (Matos, O’Neill, & Lei, 2018). For example, the leader can fire a worker without a good reason, simply because the individual suggests proper solutions to problems at hand. Since the person is threatened and perceives as if the employee might be promoted, the best way to avoid such a threat is to come up with false allegations to have a ground for firing the intelligent worker. Moreover, the failure to listen to employees might cause ethical consequences. Assume a scenario where a worker engages in corporate espionage and his colleague notices and wants to report him. In that light, a toxic leader would not listen to such a case or can ignore it. The outcome would be sharing the trade secrets of an organization with its competitors, which might promote a breach of employees’ privacy. Consequently, toxic leadership behaviors should not be tolerated since they have detrimental impacts on a firm.
Part B
The toxic leadership behaviors discussed in part A above can be prevented using the recommendations illustrated below. First, when hiring or promoting leaders, organizations should not select arrogant people. In reality, it is not difficult to recognize an arrogant individual since he or she undermines others and believes that he or she is better than anyone else. If a leader becomes arrogant, the person should be warned or demoted if he or she cannot change his or her toxic behaviors. Second, organizations should have strict policies to prevent discrimination against specific groups of employees. Workers should be allowed to report any form of discrimination to senior leaders or the human resource department. Third, the failure of active listening can be overcome by conducting regular meetings where employees can interact with their leaders and share probl...