Great men are not born great. They grow great.
Leadership is one of the most widely discussed topics, not only in organizations but also in society at large. The history of leadership thinking is, in fact, a fascinating journey — from the Trait Era, through the Behavioral Era, to today’s far more complex era, one increasingly centered on the question of ethics. That’s where the concept of ethical leadership sits: researcher Linda Treviño and her colleagues define it as demonstrating normatively appropriate conduct through one’s own actions and relationships, and then promoting that conduct among subordinates through two-way communication, reinforcement, and values-aligned decision-making.
Experiencing leadership
Over the course of my career, I’ve met leaders who operated exactly in that spirit, and others for whom leadership mostly meant control and enforced obedience. So let’s ask the obvious question: do bad leaders actually harm their teams? It seems like a question that doesn’t need research. Of course they do. And yet one of the most rigorous scientific reviews on the topic — a 2023 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Business Ethics, covering 82 studies, 104 independent samples, and more than 30,000 employees — paints a far more uncomfortable picture than we might expect. This isn’t a single study on a handful of undergraduates. It’s a synthesis of decades of longitudinal research, conducted on real employees in real organizations.
The obivous
Let’s start with what confirms our intuition. Destructive leadership — the systematic belittling, intimidating, and publicly humiliating of subordinates — correlates with worse employee outcomes: lower job satisfaction, weaker engagement, lower organizational identification, and more burnout, emotional exhaustion, intent to quit, and counterproductive work behavior — small acts of sabotage, avoidance, staying silent instead of raising problems. A toxic boss is a real, measurable burden.
But the researchers went one step further. Most earlier studies measured destructive leadership and employee outcomes at a single point in time — like a snapshot. This team gathered longitudinal data, meaning the same people were studied repeatedly over time, and asked a sharper question: what actually causes what? Does a bad boss today predict worse employee behavior tomorrow? Or could it run the other way?
The result surprised even the researchers themselves. Once they statistically accounted for autocorrelation — the simple fact that a bad boss tends to stay a bad boss, and a frustrated employee tends to stay frustrated — destructive leadership stopped significantly predicting later negative employee behavior. Employee behavior, however, did significantly predict later destructive leadership. In other words: what we label a “toxic boss” today may, in many cases, be a reaction to earlier team behavior rather than its original cause.
Before anyone breathes a sigh of relief and treats this as absolution for difficult bosses — stop. The authors themselves are explicit: this does not mean victims of bad leadership are somehow to blame. The data is correlational, not causal, and the sample in this part of the analysis was relatively small. What it points to is something subtler, and in my view more important: destructive leadership is rarely about one bad person. It’s usually a vicious circle. Provocation breeds reaction, reaction breeds further provocation, and six months later nobody remembers who started it — what remains is a team where everyone feels like the other side’s victim.
Academic findings
Picture a familiar scene from a restaurant floor. A server flags a reservations problem to the manager, who is stretched thin by a staffing shortage and cuts her off mid-sentence in front of others. Next time, she doesn’t flag the problem — why bother, when she’ll just be ignored again. The manager reads her silence as disengagement and tightens control further. She withdraws even more. Three months later, he describes a “difficult, passive employee,” and she describes a “toxic boss” to her friends. Both are right about their own experience. Neither sees that they co-created the spiral — which is exactly the mechanism the meta-analysis describes, not as an excuse for anyone, but as something to interrupt before anyone starts assigning blame.
That’s why the question “who’s at fault” is less useful than “what kind of culture allowed this.” Which brings me to a second study worth citing — an MIT Sloan Management Review analysis built on 34 million employee profiles and more than a million Glassdoor reviews, conducted at the height of the so-called Great Resignation. The conclusion: a toxic corporate culture was the single strongest predictor of attrition — 10.4 times more powerful than compensation. Pay ranked a distant sixteenth among the factors driving turnover. People don’t mostly leave for money. They leave because they feel disrespected, because they watch unethical behavior get tolerated, because the work stops meaning anything.
Which brings me to a third piece I think ties this whole puzzle together — a recent MIT Sloan Review article titled “Dethroning Loyalty.” The authors make a claim many leaders will find heretical: loyalty, as it’s typically understood at work, is a toxic concept in itself. Not because commitment is bad, but because when a boss explicitly demands loyalty, what they usually want isn’t shared mission — it’s personal obedience. The authors map out several types of workplace relationships. Coerced allegiance — “do it or else” — kills engagement and builds a culture of silence. Sycophantic allegiance — desperately currying favor with the boss — leads to promotions decided not by competence but by who you flattered. The two typically travel together, and together they create exactly the kind of tension that, in the meta-analysis discussed above, curdles into a vicious cycle of mutual provocation.
The healthiest form of relationship — the one that correlated with the highest team performance in their research — the authors call shared principled commitment: a culture where people stay devoted to the mission without sacrificing mutual respect, where telling the boss an uncomfortable truth is responsibility rather than betrayal. Teams operating this way showed measurably higher quality, efficiency, and innovation, not just better morale. The authors point to the former CEO of WD-40, who built the company culture around two values: doing the right thing, and building lasting, positive relationships with everyone the company works with. It sounds trite until you notice how rarely leaders live those values once it costs them something.
The Spiderman problem
You know that meme where Spider-Man points at Spider-Man? In management, that’s not a joke — it’s what happens when you look for someone to blame in your team and end up pointing at the system you built.
So what does this mean if you run a restaurant, a hotel, or any team working under pressure? First, stop hunting for a single guilty party. If your team has gone quiet, sarcastic, or passively resistant, that’s not a story about “one difficult employee” or “one bad manager.” It’s a signal that the system rewards compliance over honesty. Second, stop demanding loyalty and start earning commitment. Ask your team what they think before you decide, not after. Praise the people who disagree with you instead of pushing them to the margins. Third, if you notice someone who agrees with everything you say, treat that as a red flag, not a compliment. Sycophancy isn’t loyalty. It’s a lack of trust wearing a smile.
One more concrete point, drawn from the Great Resignation research, is worth adding. Contrary to popular belief, flexible scheduling isn’t what front-line workers — receptionists, servers, cooks — need most. What predicts whether they stay is schedule predictability: knowing your shifts two weeks out, and trusting they won’t change at the last minute. In one cited experiment, run across a chain of apparel stores, simply making schedules predictable improved employees’ sleep quality and meaningfully reduced stress among parents. It’s a rare example of a relatively cheap operational change acting like a trust injection — because it tells people that their time outside work matters too.
Conclusion
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote a line that has hung, in one form or another, above my desk for years: to command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less. In a kitchen, at a hotel front desk, on a restaurant floor — anywhere people work under the pressure of time and guests — that sentence is a litmus test for every leader. If your leadership serves a shared purpose, people will stay with you through the hard weeks. If it only serves you, someone will eventually push back — and according to what the research shows, it’s that pushback, not your original behavior, that will be remembered as where the problem began.
So the question isn’t “do I have a bad boss or a bad employee.” The question is: what kind of relationship am I building every day — and will it survive the first genuinely hard week.
References
Brown, M. E., & Treviño, L. K. (2006). Ethical leadership: A review and future directions. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 595–616.
Carucci, R., & Detert, J. (2026). Dethroning loyalty. MIT Sloan Management Review.
Li, P., Yin, K., Shi, J., Damen, T. G. E., & Taris, T. W. (2023). Are bad leaders indeed bad for employees? A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies between destructive leadership and employee outcomes. Journal of Business Ethics, 191, 399–413.
Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2022). Toxic culture is driving the Great Resignation. MIT Sloan Management Review.
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