PERSONALITY TRAITS OF DESTRUCTIVE LEADERSHIP
Keywords:
destructive leadership, dark side, traits, personality, consequences, behaviorAbstract
During the last decades, recent empirical studies have shown that the dark side of leadership is a complex
phenomenon, which needs to be examined in more details due to its potential negative effects on employees,
organizations and society in general. The dark side of leadership can be considered as a destructive leadership
because of a systematic and repeated behavior by a leader, supervisor or manager that violates the legitimate interest
of the organization by undermining and/or sabotaging the organization's goals, tasks, resources, and effectiveness
and/or the motivation, wellbeing or job satisfaction of subordinates. Although positive psychology emphasizes
human strengths and virtues, research on counterproductive work behaviors such as abusive supervision, executive
deviance, and excessive hypocrisy within organizations confirms the existence of a dark side to human nature. The
goal of the paper is to analyze the dark side of destructive leadership and its effect on organizational results and to
show personality traits that predict the tendency of managers to manifest and engage in destructive behavior. The
analysis of previous research results consistently indicates the correlation between personality traits, such as
Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy and everyday sadism, and destructive behavior. However, the tendencies
of the bright and dark sides of the personality overlap to some extent, and certain traits of the dark side of the
personality can have similar positive influences as the bright sides of personality, especially for overlapping areas of
individual differences that cover both domains. The most common characteristics and behaviors commonly
associated with destructive leadership include mistreatment of subordinates (such as mobbing, humiliating,
manipulating, deceiving or harassing while carrying out anti-organizational practices of fraud and corruption), desire
for power and negative thinking, personalized charisma, unpleasant and inconsistent behavior, inability to listen to
others, inability to assign duties and determine priorities, showing different behavior towards different people, and
inability to motivate subordinates. Destructive management also negatively affects employee commitment, job
satisfaction, physical and emotional wellbeing. There is a wide spectrum of harmful consequences caused by
destructive leadership, which are on the rise and can consequently lead to significant implications both at the
organizational level and at the individual and group level. The relationship between personality traits and leadership
emphasizes the need to understand the motives and values of leaders as well as other traits from the psychological
construct.
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