Source | www.weforum.org | Tania FitzGeorge-Balfour
Disagreeable, dishonest and careless bosses can mean bad outcomes for organizations and work groups. However, new research highlights that the employees they work with also play a major role in this. Employee anxiety, self-esteem and how leadership behavior is perceived can all affect the leader’s influence on outcomes — and both followers and leaders can buffer against the effects of certain undesirable traits. Published in Frontiers in Psychology as a special article collection on the ‘dark side’ of leadership, the research can help organizations identify potentially problematic leaders or followers to reduce their negative effects.
“Surprisingly, not only leaders’ but also followers’ dark-sides have emerged as hindering factors for organizational functioning. We are moving away from the somewhat unidimensional view that leaders are omnipotent and solely to blame for negative outcomes in organizations,” says Professor Susanne Braun of Durham University, UK, who co-edited the research collection together with Professor Ronit Kark, based at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Professor Barbara Wisse, based at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and Durham University, UK.
Leadership and followership are crucial aspects of organizational functioning and can affect our society at all levels. Studies integrating leader personality traits and styles, follower personality traits and behaviors as well as their contexts are rare — and most studies focus on good traits rather than ‘dark’ leadership or followership.
