Investigating the Consequences of Unethical Toxic Leadership in Organization

Toxic leadership is a kind of unethical leadership that might cause miss-consequences in organization. In this regard, the aim of this study is to identify the consequences of toxic leadership and exploring their dynamics in a model.
This research is a qualitative-correlation methodologically. The population includes employees in 21 Rafsanjan’s public organizations, known with research phenomenon of interest. The sample of 28 experts were selected using concept and snowball sampling. After studying literature and identifying consequences of toxic leadership, a half-closed Likert questionnaire was developed and distributed among mentioned experts. The questionnaires statements were screened based on fuzzy analysis. Then, the other identified consequences of toxic leadership were screened and after categorizing, the measure for ISM were developed and distributed among experts. Finally, data were analyzed and interpretative structural model of studied phenomenon were drew.
The model possessed 9 consequences in 6 levels: managerial decision making and group consequences; physical consequences; cognitive individual consequences, psychological-attitudinal individual consequences, organizational communication and climate; behavioral consequences; organizational performance and productivity; and outer-organizational consequences.
The consequences of toxic leadership are as follow: weak decision making; mental de-concentration, management instability, and no meritocracy; decline of job satisfaction, self-esteem, job motivation, organizational commitment, job performance, and employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors; emergence of deviant behaviors; increase of blood pressure, muscle spasm, job stress, depression, and employees’ amazement; increase of centralized decisions, interpersonal conflict, hypocritical behaviors in interpersonal communication, organizational anomie, dysfunctional interpersonal competition, and client’s dissatisfaction; disorder in group integrity and communication; decrease of organizational trust, cooperation, integrity, accord, interpersonal performance, productivity, and inter-organizational trust; and finally shaping the organizational mistreatment and disrespect climate.