Perspective Chapter: We expect Effective Leadership from Leaders, but is this the Case in Reality? Reframing a Much-Hyped Phenomenon by Investigating the Antithesis

Abstract

Leaders too often cause problems that challenge the effectivity of society and organisations; they exhibit bad leadership. This is an under-communicated and under-researched challenge, which is therefore investigated in the antithesis: What if leaders do not execute the effective leadership we expect of them, but quite the opposite, create problems and in-effectivity in the organisations they should serve? This is a more common challenge than many assume. Leadership is an inflated phenomenon that has somewhat distanced itself from organisational realities. There is, therefore, every reason to downscale the expectations of what can be achieved by leaders. This contribution is a nuanced analysis of leaders and their exercise of leadership. A powerful leadership industry has its own interests in promoting only the positive effects of leadership, with little interest in addressing human fallibility within the field. Other perspectives and research methods are therefore needed to avoid losing credibility and legitimacy as a research field and a resource base for professional practice. Given the human and financial toll that fallible leaders take, the advice for organisations and institutions is to develop better policies, systems, and processes that weed out negative and destructive behaviour.

1. Introduction

The aim of leadership should be to work towards solutions and the greater good, and bring about progress and development for nations, institutions, organisations, and individuals. According to Yukl, ‘Effective leadership at all levels of society and in all our organisations is essential for coping with the growing social, economic, and environmental problems confronting the world. Learning to cope with these problems is not a luxury but a necessity’ ([1], p. 422). This premise, which has support among many scholars [2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and practitioners, implies that leadership is important. Day further [7] claimed that leadership explains more than 40 percent of the variance in organisational performance [8]. Avolio and colleagues argued that leadership interventions produced a 66 percent probability of achieving a positive outcome [9]. Others [10] have referred to evolutionary psychology as well as historical leaders and achievements in China, the Roman Empire, the Church, and military organisations in seeking to prove that leadership matters, as they assert that humans are biologically and psychologically conditioned for leadership and followership [11].

There is a tendency to attribute outcomes to people in salient positions [12]. An over-optimistic belief in leadership is also due to reverse attribution, wherein people seek to identify a leader thought to have caused success, even when arguments suggest otherwise. This has resulted in the construction of a seductive and overly positive research field and practice. This construction is supported by easy-to-sell concepts, tools, motivating TED-like talks, and a huge volume of best-selling books providing recipes for success. All are based on the thesis that leaders are important, and their exercise of leadership contributes to progress for nations, organisations, and individuals.

This may be the case, but to challenge a powerful stance, the antithesis is examined herein: What if leadership—and leaders—rather than helping to find solutions and provide progress, are sometimes the source of problems, inefficiency, and destructiveness? Numerous corporate scandals involving lying, cheating, larceny, and greed point to failure among leaders and justify such enquiry, as do reports of corporate lapses and catastrophes that conclude that the problems could be traced back to failures in leadership and a lack of appropriate leadership quality. Therefore, there are justified qualms about the quality of leaders and their exercise of leadership [13]. Within leadership studies, such perspectives are referred to as the dark side of leadership. The underlying assumption among many, however, is that the negative effects of leadership are an anomaly. It is striking how little leadership research has focused on the negative effects of leadership [14]. Scholars have been more concerned with studying leadership behaviours that should be encouraged than with researching negative, even unhealthy, aspects of leadership.

One could therefore argue that the field of leadership needs to be protected from itself and steadily increasing self-confidence, which is not always justified. The current scholarly leadership field exaggerates what can be achieved through leadership and downplays its negative aspects. Consequently, a more sober analysis of leadership and its contribution to society and organisations is needed. In this respect, business schools play an important role in challenging the leadership industry, which has a vested interest in hyping leadership. Further, researchers need a greater focus on realities rather than ideals, as we need to know more about leadership in complex, lived, everyday organisational realities. The study of leadership should also take a greater interest in human fallibility and discuss the under-researched and under-communicated darker sides of leadership.

This chapter is conceptual and draws on literature from critical theory and studies of managerial work and leadership practice. It is structured as follows: First, the worrying signals that suggest that there are frequent problems with the exercise of leadership are discussed. Second, examples of the problem-creating behaviour of leaders, a behaviour more common than one should think, are elaborated. Third, corrective measures are suggested. Lastly, the chapter concludes with the contention that the antithesis discussed herein needs to be taken more seriously if the leadership field is to advance and contribute solutions and progress to societal and organisational challenges.

2. Unhealthy and unproductive work environments

Studies on performance indicate that many leaders are ineffective, incompetent, or even complete failures [15, 16, 17]. They may bully and abuse power, acts that are potentially damaging to employees’ health [18]. Bullying from leaders is the greatest source of unhappiness among employees and leads to higher rates of sickness leave and resignation [19]. A Norwegian study suggests that up to 3 percent of employees report they are bullied by people in leadership roles at work [20]. Further, approximately 25 percent of employees stated that their effectiveness at work was impaired due to bullying by leaders. According to approximately 20 percent of respondents, this bullying reduced their job satisfaction [14]. It is difficult to assess whether such figures are generally representative, but there is reason to think that they are. Evidently, situational factors obviously influence such an analysis. It is a leader’s role to exert influence and authority, but finding socially acceptable ways of exerting authority while exercising consistent leadership seems to be difficult in many cultures [21]. Moreover, it is well documented that power corrupts [22, 23, 24].

There is also evidence that only 30 percent of organisations experience a healthy work environment [25, 26]. Employee satisfaction surveys indicate that dealing with one’s immediate superior is the most stressful part of one’s job [27, 28]. Most important to work itself and closely linked to leaders’ actions—or lack thereof—are control and autonomy over one’s own job, given leaders’ micromanagement and excessive control. A lack of job control affects mental health and physical health outcomes. For a subordinate, not being able to influence one’s own work environment is stressful and a source of powerlessness, regardless of the jobholder’s salary or formal status [29, 30, 31]. Therefore, job autonomy is one of the most important predictors of job satisfaction and work motivation and is frequently ranked higher even than pay [32].

The consequences of the above shortcomings have a negative influence on subordinates’ working attitudes [33] and lead to increased depression, stress, insecurity, and fear [34]; decreased task performance, satisfaction, and well-being [35]; poorer leader–subordinate relationships [36]; increased work conflict [37] and turnover [33]; and decreased organisational commitment [38]. Contextual and situational factors obviously affect the behaviour of both leaders and subordinates. Consequently, the antithesis is not only due to the leaders themselves. Evidently, contextual, and situational factors also trigger destructive behaviour in both leaders and subordinates, and place constraints on what leaders can achieve; however, this is a question of degree and frequency. Achieving operational excellence is a massive challenge for most organisations [39] and is even more challenging when leadership is ineffective.

3. Constraints to effective leadership

Unhealthy and unproductive work environments are often due to a lack of high-quality leadership raw material—the people who are attracted by and recruited to leadership positions. There is a relationship between a desire for power and advancement to leadership positions [40, 41]. However, here we find a double-edged sword. Some of the forces driving leaders to seek power may also be destructive [42]. Qualities that may be important for leaders also contain elements of psychoticism [43]. This includes traits such as aggression, egocentrism, and narcissism [44]—even sadistic traits [45]. Personality research indicates that narcissism, paranoia, and character deviation influence how leadership is played out [46], and a ‘dark triad’ personality refers to the toxic cocktail of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy [47]. These qualities can propel leaders forward, but they may also be associated with personality disorders and ineffective leadership.

The aforementioned traits, individually and collectively, produce dysfunctional leaders who may act destructively and tyrannically and are likely to engage in micromanagement. Leadership positions thus seem to appeal to individuals with self-centred, status-obsessed, emotionally cold, and aggressive personalities. Dysfunctional personality types are disproportionately represented in executive positions [48], as these positions offer large opportunities for personal gain and privileges, while the risks of loss are correspondingly small.

People not suited for leadership should obviously not be recruited to positions of power, but search and selection processes may be flawed. A lack of competence among recruiters is one reason for this [49]. Findings also indicate that candidates who are extroverted and confident are more often recruited than those who are humble, introverted, and realistic about the challenges of a leadership job [50]. It is thus a paradox that when organisations are recruiting leaders, they often want individuals who are energetic and able to accomplish a lot, can make tough decisions, possess self-confidence, and be strong [44]. Paradoxically, these are the same characteristics found in people with a high degree of narcissistic traits [51].

However, as many leaders learn to hide such traits, they remain undetected by the people who employ them [52], as many recruitment and selection processes overly focus on the positive aspects of leadership. In general, organisations seem to have great self-confidence in their ability to find the right leadership candidates. However, this self-confidence is not always justified [53]. Search and selection processes strive to predict the future performance of leaders, and it is estimated by some scholars that leaders are mis-employed in as much as 50 percent of cases [54, 55]. Mathematicians’ simulations even suggest that the base rate of leader incompetence is between 50 and 75 percent, leading researchers to suggest that organisations sometimes would be better off choosing leaders by pulling names from a hat than from an evaluation process [56].

There are constraints to effective leadership in most organisations [50, 57, 58]. Leaders work under difficult framework conditions. They often must function in unclear roles and survive hectic workdays with cross-pressures, resource scarcity, target conflicts, stress, and friction. Leaders at the lower, middle, and top levels in both the private and public sectors often face high performance pressures, hectic and long workdays, time pressure, uncertainty, pressure to constantly change, restructuring requirements, emotionally charged situations that they must deal with, and difficulties that they must resolve. They also need to manage scarce resources and tight budgets. They often have many stakeholders to attend to and may experience conflicts between goals and means. They need to balance stability with change, short-term goals with long-term visions, and organisational development while launching new strategic initiatives. Therefore, few leaders have the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to cope with such a wide range of tasks and challenges, and most work against the odds [59].

Thus, we ought to lower expectations and not always expect effective leadership from leaders; instead, we should, as a minimum, expect leaders not to create problems and ineffectiveness in organisations by abusing power, bullying, creating unhealthy work environments, or otherwise exhibiting destructive behaviour. If it is the case that ineffective behaviour from leaders is taking place more often than expected, the more interesting enquiry, then, is why does the leadership community still cling to the thesis that leadership is effective, important, and positive, and under-research and under-communicate the antithesis?

4. A powerful leadership industry that clings to the ideals

Not surprisingly, there are stakeholders with a vested interest in keeping alive the thesis that leadership is important while inflating the importance of leaders. This applies to the leaders themselves, as well as to the boards on which they sit, leadership developers, management consultants, head-hunters, leadership researchers, and business schools. There is a powerful leadership industry sweet-talking leadership, which makes a living claiming that leadership is important [60, 61]. During the last 30 years or so, a ‘global theory industry’ has emerged with powerful players [62]. The players are reputable business schools and large international consulting companies. They partly live off developing and selling new theories, solutions, methods, and tools to leaders. Further, they inflate the importance of leaders leading and the importance of organisations selecting the right leaders, as well as paying them well.

In academia, the focus on leadership is relatively new. The 1990s saw increased attention to leadership, whereas before then, organisations were administered or managed [13]. Over the last 30 years, the number of scientific articles on leadership in international journals has exploded. Leadership research is often normative; that is, it focuses on what leaders should do but says less about what they actually do—the mundane, everyday activities leaders often spend most of their time on. This is perhaps due to a need to justify the field of study and gain academic recognition, as well as to the implicit assumption that leadership is regarded as important. It may also be due to tactical reasons for ambitious researchers to publish articles that support normative models and the theses related to these models. Leadership is thus an intellectually weak field due to ideological undertones and methodological reductionism [57]. The field struggles to gain academic recognition. There is little agreement about theoretical frameworks in the field; there are no generally accepted universal theories that can be tested, and methodologies and analytical techniques are not always sufficiently rigorous. Further, the large number of leadership gurus, superficial concepts, and airport bestseller-style publications do little to enhance the seriousness of the field.

In much of the leadership literature, in MBA courses, and in leadership development programmes, leadership is commonly presented as an ordered and controllable activity, but such assumptions are of limited use in real-life situations, where leaders must cope with many demands, as well as complexity, and uncertainty. Leaders commonly operate in stressful environments with conflicting expectations, and their work is more likely to be characterised by reacting to events, fragmentation, and a hectic pace than by order [63]. Thus, there is a gap between the normative ideals presented in the leadership literature and the reality faced by many leaders. People, however, seem to want the ideals; they want their leaders to be good people who work for the common good. Fairhurst and Connaughton exemplified this misconception by arguing that ‘leadership actors are reflexive practitioners who shape and are shaped by realities they co-create. They also have the capacity for morally grounded, relationally responsive action as they account for their actions to themselves and others’ [64].

One may argue that leadership is ultimately a moral endeavour [65], especially as the activity involves the use of power, to which one needs bulwarks in the form of moral and ethical reflection. Belonging to a species whose members justify their actions morally, people, including leaders, commonly think of themselves as good and their behaviour as defensible, even when these propositions are objectively dubious [66]. Consequently, in much of the literature, the authors frame leadership as something good or, at least, effective. Thus, leadership is used, at least subconsciously, as a ‘hallelujah’ word. Leaders do good things, many seem to assume. They help people and organisations develop. In the leadership literature, we will therefore not read so much about leaders doing bad leadership [67].

The bulk of the leadership literature, therefore, provides an abundance of success stories about business leaders, tech entrepreneurs, and political leaders. It would be fine if such an understanding of leadership reflects reality, but often it does not. First, other perspectives on leadership fade into the background, crowded out by the volume of feel-good literature, TED-like talks, and glossy leadership concepts. Second, the understanding that leadership is always effective is self-reinforcing and leads many to look for facts that confirm preconceived assumptions. Third, the search for efficient leadership creates unrealistic expectations of what leaders can achieve. Lastly, there are leaders, as argued herein, who do not practice effective leadership; thus, we cannot say that leadership is always effective. Since leaders have the power and opportunities to make a difference in people’s lives, we certainly want them to be people with good qualities, and this leads to attribution. Many, therefore, cling to the hope that leaders are good people who want to achieve the best for the community or society. People need the illusion, but the wish to identify goodness in leadership sometimes clouds reality.

5. A failure to address human fallibility

Leaders, like most others, are fallible; they are not always perfect, good, effective, and able to work for the greater good. Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning author, wrote that human societies tend to share universal descriptions of good and bad human qualities, yet in some societal contexts, the people who possess those so-called ‘bad’ qualities are successful, while those who possess the ‘good’ qualities fail [68, p. 80]. The author further writes, ‘perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox’ [68, p. 80].

Errare humanum est, one says in Latin, ‘to err is human’. This applies to leaders, but in the literature, the focus is rarely on ‘to err’ and not always even on ‘human’ but on superhuman strengths and potential. One may find support in the tendency of human societies and their institutions to fragment into a Hobbesian view of society with competing groups, leaving people all too ready to adopt prejudices and pursue quarrels, disputes, and even feuds [69]. Human beings have the intellectual and cultural capacity to form functioning societies, institutions, and organisations, but they frequently fail to use this capacity properly. The result is societies torn apart by war, violence, crime, dissension, and inequality, and organisations ruined by destructiveness, power struggles, inefficiency, miscommunication, and disorder. Scholars struggle to understand why this is the case, variously appointing blame to nature, nurture, government, politics, leaders, short-sightedness, greed, and selfishness. Human beings obviously have predispositions to cooperate, to discriminate between the trustworthy and the treacherous, to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to organise work that needs to be done [70]. The human mind also has the ability to build social cooperation and create positive human interactions. In fact, cooperativeness may be said to be the very hallmark of being human and what sets us apart from other species [71]. Obviously, most leaders have the intellect, instincts, and temperament to foster the greater good, progress, and effective work environments, whereas others foster self-interest, conflict, and antisocial behaviour. Therefore, most leaders—as well as their subordinates—are far more nuanced than they appear in the bulk of the leadership literature.

One can obviously choose to disregard leadership as a discipline altogether and instead study and practice administrative behaviour. Disregard the last 30 years of leadership hype. According to Kellerman ([60], p. 200), ‘Leadership is in danger of becoming obsolete’ [72]. If leaders and their poor performance of leadership are the source of problems, not the providers of solutions, the remedy may be to eliminate the leader profession altogether and organise alternative decision-making and coordination mechanisms, such as self-governing groups, autonomous organisations, and shared or distributed leadership. However, this is easier said than done. Leadership is strongly tied to our cultural web and is connected to human psychology and biology. There will always be leaders. It is therefore valid to maintain an interest in leadership and leaders, as they often have an impact, one way or the other, on other people’s lives.

6. Challenging the dominating positive leadership narrative

Hegelian dialectic comprises the thesis, the antithesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of synthesis [73]. The thesis within most leadership research and practice is that leaders are instrumental for ensuring progress in organisations, institutions, and societies. There is obvious support for such a claim, although the evidence is not as solid as many have argued. The antithesis is that leaders do not always provide progress; on the contrary, they create problems, destructiveness, and in-effectivity in organisations and societies. Obviously, one may argue that studies indicating such behaviour are merely anecdotal rather than representative evidence, but this is not a productive way forward. Instead, we should challenge the dominating narrative told and sold by the leadership community.

One obvious solution is to promote critical thinking. Reading critical theory would, of course, not guarantee that leaders behave better, but critical perspectives are potentially far-reaching in the study and practice of leadership [74]. Critical thinking raises several relevant leadership issues in contemporary organisations and societies. Examples are power/identity dialectics, elite problems, simplistic notions of ‘leader’ and ‘follower’, and differences and inequalities in organisations in the form of gender, ethnicity, class, age, disability, faith, and national origin. Critical perspectives also challenge an important premise: that leadership is associated with membership in an elite, handpicked group of people who share specific attributes that they can learn/develop and thereby are destined to govern others. This idea is particularly rooted in the grooming place for most leaders, the leadership education and development community.

Business schools are important players in the production of leadership research and theory, beyond being the source of education preferred by many leaders. The doorway to knowledge matters. Business schools have received much criticism in recent years. In particular, there is a call for many schools to better connect themselves to the realities of the organisational world and resist the urge to invent an abstract world that they find more attractive—a temptation that goes back to the ancient interplay of Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to the world. This is for reasons that are methodical, as well as financial and strategic. The elephant in the room in this discussion is financial; there is less money to be made on teaching the antithesis than on marketing, educating, and researching the positive effects of leadership. In 2011, the American Association of Business estimated that there were around 13,000 business schools in the world employing huge numbers of people and graduating large volumes of students leaving campuses with business, management, or leadership-related degrees. In 2013, the top 20 US MBA programmes charged at least 100,000 USD. Parker (2018) thus estimated that business schools globally have an income of at least 400 billion USD [75]. We can further add the market for accreditation agencies, textbooks, scientific journals, and conferences. In 1970, Illich argued that business schools have become places that hoard knowledge and then distribute it to reward those who can pay and conform to certain expectations [76].

The radical solution is to dismantle the business schools in their present forms altogether and reimagine schooling as a web of communication, cooperation, and peer-to-peer learning, without the professors, certificates, and degrees. Technology development already assists in such a shift, as more and more courses are distributed online and made cheaper and even free of charge. Schools are, therefore, already shifting their strategic focus to adapt to this change. However, business schools will, of course, not let go of their revenues or their monopoly on research-based knowledge. Given that most schools are pragmatic institutions and instrumental in their decision-making, if sources of funding from central government bodies, supranational institutions, and research bodies are directed towards business schools to provide more nuanced perspectives, the schools will realign their strategies.

Further, much research has been pursuing the wrong kind of relevance: primarily relevance to business organisations and their effectiveness rather than relevance to the complex problems that matter to society and work environments. Why study leadership at all if the objective is simply to predict business effectiveness? All that time and money spent on studying and practicing leadership is for nothing if leadership does not have a positive impact on people, organisations, and society. Revised research strategies and directions therefore need to include fresh thinking about the value of leadership and leaders. This applies to problems that stimulate better methods for selecting the most suited to lead, better transparency in organisations, and improved measures and standards for work force productivity, well-being, and health.

7. Addressing messy organisational realities

Much leadership research, teaching, and development has de-coupled itself from organisational realities. Consider the following statement from Burns:

I believe leadership is not only a descriptive term but a prescriptive one, embracing a moral, even a passionate, dimension. Consider our common usage. We do not call for good leadership—we expect, or at least hope, that it will be good. ‘Bad’ leadership implies no leadership. I contend there is nothing neutral about leadership; it is valued as a moral necessity ([77], p. 2).

By stating this, Burns disregarded many leaders from the leadership profession, as many of them do not embrace morality or passion or perform what he calls ‘good leadership’. He falls into the same trap as many others. They idealise leaders because they need to believe in something bigger than themselves. When somebody is given power and the right to govern others, people would like that person to be a person who adheres to ideals and morals and uses the given power wisely, fairly, and justly.

Two decades ago, Starkey and Madan sparked a debate over whether the predominance of an overly academic and theoretical mode of knowledge production has given rise to a relevance gap between research and the organisations that such research should serve, and ultimately whether leadership research is reproducing itself [78]. A large volume of leadership studies is based on quantitative analyses using questionnaires in which a limited number of variables are examined, leading to reductionism and simplistic casual explanations that are often distant from organisational reality. When Lowe and Gardner summarised the research methods used in empirical articles in the first 10 years of the journal The Leadership Quarterly, they found that 64 percent of them used a questionnaire-based approach [79]. A later analysis of the second 10 years confirmed the same trend [80]. Kaiser et al. concluded that most leadership research concerns how individual leaders are perceived and provides less data about the actual process of leadership [81]. Researchers have, to a great extent, researched a population—leaders—that is tangible and easy to measure. There has been less research on the phenomenon—leadership—the processes, interactions, relationships, subordinates, and contextual and structural frameworks.

The remedies would, of course, complicate the work of researchers and obstruct the measurement, number crunching, and easy routes to being published. Studies of leadership should, at a minimum, be supplemented with methods that move out of the idealised world and study actual work practices, not loosely or disconnected representations. Research needs to refrain from dichotomies and tautologies and avoid packaging what may be a scattered and ambiguous set of behaviours and responses into a categorised leadership concept. A more nuanced view of the role of leadership and the work of leaders would not lessen their significance. Leadership often matters, for good or for bad.

There is therefore a need to connect with the messy, complex, volatile, and uncertain reality experienced in organisations, not some constructed hyper-reality modelled in questionnaires or interviews with leaders themselves, in which they inflate their doings. Bryman noted that little has changed since Conger’s call for greater use of participant observation in the study of leadership, acknowledging that leadership studies are over-reliant on questionnaires [82, 83]. Since leadership studies overwhelmingly focus on behaviour, the infrequent use of observation of interaction and lived experience is surprising. Such research would reveal the messy reality in which most leaders and subordinates operate and the gap between the idealised models and the everyday complexity they experience [84]. Moving leadership research forward will also require multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary efforts, as well as time-consuming in-depth studies. This explains why some researchers are reluctant to study leadership embedded in organisational reality, along with the fact that such data offer fewer opportunities for quantitative analysis that give their studies more ‘scientific’ packaging. As a research community, we know enough about the ideals; we need to know more about lived organisational realities and actual practices of leadership.

8. Darker sides of leadership complement the understanding

Bad leadership is not leadership, claimed Burns above [77], but this is not a sound argument. Bad leadership, in its many shades of grey or even black, is not uncommon, and it needs to be studied and understood. Specific research strands have addressed destructiveness [85, 86, 87, 88], toxic leadership [89, 90, 91, 92], and the darker side of leadership in general [83, 93, 94]. Terms such as negative leadership [95], narcissistic leadership [96], abusive leadership [97], tyrannical leadership [33], derailed leadership [98], and unethical leadership [99] are also in use, spotlighting a lack of competence, character, and/or care by the leader. The common factor of such studies is that people in organisations, including the leaders themselves, are not just conscious, highly focused, rational individuals. They are also subject to (often contractionary) wishes, desires, conflicts, defensive behaviours, and anxieties—some conscious, others beyond consciousness—but this is not a much-taken perspective within leadership studies. Even the most successful organisational leaders are prone to irrational behaviour, an anomaly often ignored by researchers.

Much of what goes on between people in organisations takes place in the intrapsychic and interpersonal worlds of organisational members [100]. The underlying mental activity and behaviour are therefore of interest, as well as the causes that influence human behaviour and the forces affecting people’s behaviour, preventing them from being effective. If we are to understand why leaders do not always engage in effective leadership, then we must understand the conflicts, protection mechanisms, tensions, and feelings that affect leadership behaviour. Darker sides of human behaviour make leaders misperceive situations and conversations and act in inappropriate ways. Disciplines such as psychodynamics, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, developmental psychology, and neuropsychology contribute to an understanding of the above [101, 102, 103]. The premise is that a portion of the regulation of people’s behaviour takes place outside the domain of conscious awareness. This gives rise to defensive reactions, innate response patterns, and scripts that in many cases have outlived their effectiveness. The result may be that people use different types of destructive behaviour in their interaction with others [104].

The above themes are under-researched and under-communicated in leadership studies. More research into the darker sides of leadership has the potential to provide a more comprehensive perspective of leadership, giving recruiters and organisations better support on how to deal with such issues. Research on the darker sides of leadership has made much progress over the last two decades, but it is still a young field. Research is needed on more than destructive traits; we also need to study actual leader behaviour, rather than only follower perceptions, as well as contextual variables [105].

9. Conclusion

The field of leadership is inflated because of the somewhat infinite belief in the essentiality of leadership, while it is also the case that leaders cause problems and ineffectiveness. It may even appear that the darker, or at least grey, sides of leadership are often the norm, rather than the exception, in numerous organisations, institutions, and societies. This is obviously troubling, both because of the challenges this creates and the formation of a scholarly field that has somewhat distanced itself from the reality that the field was intended to address. This mismatch has been under-researched and under-communicated.

Of course, there are many leaders who do a good, even excellent, job, but it is difficult to assess the representativity of such people, given that research is overly focused on the positive effects of leadership and neglects its negative aspects. This is because there is a powerful leadership industry that has its own interests in promoting positive leadership as well as the need to scientifically justify a growing and important field of study. There is also little interest in addressing human fallibility within leadership studies, overshadowed by the assumption that leaders are good people without too many faults. Corrective actions are needed in this respect to avoid the loss of credibility and legitimacy as a research field and as a resource base for professional leadership practice. Otherwise, we will continue to nurture an elitist field of study that lacks focus on what is really occurring in organisations, along with the influence of gender, culture, religion, and demographics, and the organisational, structural, and contextual realities. This will neither serve society as a whole nor the field as a research discipline or as a resource base for leaders.

The theoretical contribution herein is a nuanced analysis of leadership. Problem-creating behaviour and destructiveness by leaders are more common than many assume. The present chapter also contributes to the debate about which research methods are best suited for studying leadership. Studying complex, lived organisational realities is best achieved by an increased use of research methods such as ethnography, autoethnography, discourse analysis, action research and multi-method approaches. The challenge is that such methods, which may be demanding in terms of time and resources, are not always favoured by top journals, and are therefore easily down prioritised by researchers in pursuit of publications and citations.

For practitioners, given the human and financial toll that fallible leaders take, the advice for organisations and institutions is to develop better policies and systems that weed out those not suited for leadership. Further, they should instigate processes that institutionalise destructive-intolerant cultures, as well as increase the transparency and accountability of leadership to deal with, adjust for, and correct human fallibility. Accordingly, there is every reason to downscale the expectations of what leaders can achieve, at least within short timeframes, in organisations.