While many publications focus on traits and behaviours that make leaders effective,

some leaders engage in dysfunctional and destructive behaviours. These “toxic leadership”
styles have been largely unexplored. The goals of this study were to empirically derive the
dimensions of toxic leadership, to create a reliable and valid survey that measures the
construct, to explore convergent and discriminant construct validity, and to perform a
preliminary examination of subordinate outcomes that may result from working under a toxic
leader. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies across military and civilian
sectors, this study suggests that toxic leadership is composed of the following five
dimensions: abusive supervision, authoritarian leadership, narcissism, self-promotion, and
unpredictability. Toxic leadership is differentiable from other leadership constructs (e.g.,
transformational, LMX) and its dimensions significantly predict employee outcomes such as
turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and satisfaction with the supervisor. Implications for
future research are discussed.

One method toxic leader lure us is by constantly feeding us delusions that lead us to
believe they are all-powerful and that we are comparatively pretty incompetent. They
undermine our ability to behave autonomously because we followers feel the need to rely on
them. Toxic leaders engage in a variety of behaviours, including stifling criticism, lying,
incorrectly diagnosing issues, and undermining the systems and procedures established to
uphold excellence, truth, and justice. They routinely commit unethical, unlawful, and
occasionally even criminal behaviours while doing this. Finding scapegoats and encouraging
others to punish and blame them are two more behaviours of toxic leaders.

Toxic leaders are not all the same. Kusy and Holloway (2009) factored toxic
leadership behavior into three types: (a) Shaming; (b) Passive hostility; and (c) Team
sabotage. They explained how each of these types works in concert with one another to keep
toxic leadership in place. Nonetheless, the three types lack the necessary specificity to
provide a clear understanding of how toxic leadership looks in practice. Other researchers
have provided more detailed lists of the behavioral traits of toxic leaders.For example, in a
study of toxic leadership in the U.S. Army, Williams (2005) identified 18 separate types of
toxic leaders, along with a separate set of 18 personal characteristics. Table 1 depicts the
results from Williams’ research.
 Toxic leadership is found in degrees. Kusy and Holloway’s description of toxic
leadership (2009) makes the distinction between leaders who might have a bad day and those
whose bad behavior is habitual. They asked their participants to recall someone from their
professional experience whom they thought of as toxic, then rate that person on a scale of 1 to
10, with 10 being the most toxic that they could imagine. Three quarters of the persons
considered as toxic registered 8 to 10. Moreover, there was an even distribution between
males and females among the persons identified as toxic. In Kusy and Holloway’s study,
toxic behaviour was found to be an equal opportunity phenomenon.

It’s not surprising that educational organizations are destroyed by toxic leaders, Goldman
(2006) stated that toxic leaders are not alike. A distinction was noticed between several types
of toxic leading behaviours, the most prominent of which are; Disabling; where they stop the
flow of creativity and innovation and highlighting the capabilities of employees and the
brilliance of their skills. Also, passive hostility; especially for those who disagree with his
opinion, even if they were right. As well as sabotaging the team; to kill the confidence among
them, and to be in control (divide and conquer) or to isolate those who disagree with him
from his colleagues and encourage them to communicate with him less often. Among the
behaviours of the toxic leader is to intimidate the target employee, exaggerate his mistakes, or
underestimate and demean his achievements. He also imposes his domination on his
employees and marginalized their roles in the system. As well as deceiving them and using
his influence to manipulate them.

The term wellbeing is operationalized in a variety of ways, such as to refer to psychological

flourishing, life satisfaction, happiness, or finding meaning in life (Howell et al., 2016).
Although definitions of well-being abound in the literature, there is a growing consensus that
wellbeing is a complex construct that concerns optimal experience and functioning.
Explorations of what it means to live a good life are frequently characterized as being
consistent with on
Methodology

Limitations of the research 31.

The results of this study are based on the subjective measures of well-being and subjective
perceptions of factors that influence it. This approach requires asking people to give their
own perception of their well-being and report on what matters to them. Even though this gave
us a rich insight into the levels of well-being in the education sector and the factors that
influence it, the study does not include any objective measures of well-being. Having said
that, using objective measures has disadvantages because many are only proxies for
measuring well-being.

32. Measuring stress at work and the impact of the job on physical and mental health in this
study was not based on a medical diagnosis. Questions were phrased in a way that allowed
respondents to express their own perceptions of the impact of their job on their health.

33. The current public narrative of teachers being stressed might encourage individuals to
report higher levels of stress than they might otherwise have done

There are 114 primary schools and 8000 teachers throughout the five districts in Penang.
Based on the sample size calculation, the minimum sample size was 367 numbers of teachers
out of 8000 teachers in Penang. The average number of teachers in each school is about 30-
40 teachers. Therefore, the total number of schools needed to give the required number of
teachers is about 30-34 schools or 30% of the total number of schools in Penang. The schools
were selected randomly stratified based on the districts in Penang from the list of primary
schools provided by Education Department, Penang. All teachers in selected schools were
eligible to participate in the study. Teachers who disagreed to participate in the study were
excluded.

Thien, L. M. (2022). Psychometric analysis of a Malay language version of Principal

Instructional Management Rating Scale. Educational, Management, Administration, &
Leadership, 50(4), 711-733. Doi: 10.1177/1741143220942514

Thien, L. M., & Lee, H. C. (2022). Is 'the more the better'? Investigating linear and nonlinear
effects of school culture on teacher well-being and commitment to teaching across school
size. Studies in Educational Evaluation. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2022.101176

Thien, L. M., Adams, D., Koh, S. H., & Yap, P. L. (2022). Exploring value-driven leadership:
Perspectives from school leaders. Journal of Research on Leadership Education. Doi:
10.1177/19427751221097988.
Ding, Z., & Thien, L. M. (2022). Assessing the antecedents and consequences of teacher
leadership: A partial least squares analysis. International Journal of Leadership in Education.
Doi: 10.1080/13603124.2022.20681919.

A toxic leader is selfish and self-destructive; destroying corporate structures for personal gains or to
satisfy his/her ego. The term ‘toxic leader’ was coined is often associated with various dysfunctional
styles of leadership. The phrase is attributed to Marcia Lynn Whicker, who coined the term in 1996.
Marcia in her book titled ‘Toxic Leaders: When Organizations Go Bad’ described three distinct
leadership types, including trustworthy, transitional, and toxic leadership styles.

Toxic leaders are competitive and will do almost anything to get what they want. Competition can be
healthy given the right context, but a leader that will compete to “win” and take credit exemplifies
toxic leadership.

As the need of retaining good employees increase, it is particularly beneficial to establish a

stronger connection between these employees and their employing organizations. Based on
the type of connection employees have with their employer, organizational commitment can
be affective, continual, and normative (Wilson, 2014)

Instrument Design Schmidt’s [44] Toxic Leadership Scale © is a 30-item questionnaire

designed to identify leadership behaviours. Each question was rated on a 5-point Likert scale
with answers ranging between 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree. Schmidt [44]
reported Cronbach’s alphas for the five sub-scales as follows: self-promotion = 0.91; abusive
supervision = 0.93; unpredictability = 0.92; narcissism = 0.88; authoritarian leadership =
0.89. To provide balance in the data collection procedures and to allay potential disquiet in
researching only the dark side of leadership, each measure was counterbalanced with its
positive counterpart. For example, where the scale asks: The most destructive leader I have
ever experienced has explosive outbursts, the counterbalance was also included i.e., The most
constructive leader I have experienced is patient and able to control their anger. This was
done to address concerns that a study that examined toxic leadership alone might cause
offence to school leaders. No school leader or school was identified in the data collection
process and participants were explicitly asked not to identify any specific leader and that if
they did so, this data would be excluded. This was

The study was designed within a critical, interpretivist, constructivist paradigm

(Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Simpson & Freeman, 2004). We assumed that teachers were
actively involved in the construction of meaning (Bruner, 1996) around their wellbeing and
that they were able to describe and reflect on their sensemaking of the enablers and inhibitors
to their wellbeing in the context around them. Participants were invited to take part in focus
groups which were structured according to educator background or setting. Regardless of
background, participants were provided with the option to represent any of the group(s) they
most closely identified with.