When Leadership Attacks: Stories of Surviving the Worst Bosses

Inspired by the stories of negative leadership encounters curated in When Leadership Fails (Morris & Edmonds, 2021), the current symposium continues the plight to identify, deconstruct, and process leadership at its worst. Leadership from the worst bosses can span the gamut from mere ineffectiveness to extreme unconscionable behavior (Normore & Brooks, 2016). It often emanates from self-centered personality traits that trigger indifference, arrogance, intemperance, envy, and greed (Walker & Kutsyuruba, 2016). It can include bullying, humiliation, manipulation, deception, and harassment. At times it is abusive in the form of ongoing verbal and nonverbal hostility (Tepper, 2000). It may present as unethical leadership when bosses act without a moral compass (Aboyassin & Abood, 2013). It can even involve organizational sabotage in the form of absenteeism, deception, or stealing (Einarsen, Aasland, & Skogstad, 2007).

We understand experiences with poor leadership and bad bosses significantly impact individual and organizational outcomes (Aboyassin & Abood, 2013). The damage can be long-standing, affecting victims and witnesses even if they move onto new supervisors, departments, or organizations. Bosses and their bad leadership can incite anxiety that increases perceived exposure to negative leadership behaviors going forward and how employees respond to such behavior (Tepper, 2000). Employees who endure these experiences are more likely to interpret unfavorable actions as abusive, even if they are not. They may also be more prone to respond negatively to critical actions and decisions.

The symposium serves as a direct response to calls from Johnson (2018) for leaders to combat evil by stepping out of the shadows, Edmonds (2021) for addressing the dark side of the leadership spectrum and associated consequences, and Klenke (2008) for qualitative documentation of leadership experiences that shape communities, organizations, and nations. In the spirit of Sims & Hughes (2018), we seek to meet the needs of the modern workforce by empowering employees and reimaging approaches to leadership. These stories of surviving bad bosses were deconstructed in the same vein previous works (Carmeli & Sheaffer, 2008; Kellerman, 2004; Normore & Brooks, 2016) unpacked leader failure and bad boss behavior—to promote learning, employee healing, and leader development.

In the symposium, Dr. Sharon Lassiter reflects on lessons learned from surviving bad bosses in educational leadership. She recounts professional struggles with two different supervisors at opposite ends of the charisma spectrum. She examines how leader ineffectiveness, lack of vision, poor communication, and micromanagement (among other things) provided critical experiences that taught her the value of power and necessity of coping mechanisms. Dr. David Sippio tackles the underpinnings of workplace bullying. He explores the roots of toxic, bullying leadership behavior in the tyrannical, destructive philosophy of American slavery. He integrates reflections on his personal encounters with these bad bosses with critical analysis of how these ideas evolved in leadership theory. Through it all, he offers strategies to combat the personal anxiety and bewilderment that can result from exposure to these leadership practices. Through case study analysis, Dr. Comfort Okpala explores abusive leadership in the context of an unstable organization. High employee turnover was the result of ineffective managers and lack of accountability. Incompetence, self-centered, micromanagement, and intimidation emerged as themes to describe how participants experienced abusive supervision. Forming alliances and being authentic emerged to describe strategies used to navigate the abusive work environment. Dr. Heidi Marshall grapples with the effects of toxic masculinity on women in the workplace. She dissects poor leadership fueled by harmful motives and the aftermath. In processing her own psychological distress, she identifies the lasting impact of these experiences. With experiences that run the gamut of struggling to articulate what happened to disengaging with the work environment, she unravels the damage caused by bad bosses.

We owe the utmost gratitude to our contributing authors. Thank you for sharing these experiences. Thank you for trusting us to relay them to the leadership community in this way. We value your time, scholarship, and reflection.