This article examines negative or destructive leadership behaviors experienced by high-potential senior military officers and civilian employees. The study used a questionnaire based on the Petty Tyranny in Organizations Scale to explore the scope and nature of destructive leadership as reported by U.S. members of the class of 2008 at a military senior service college. It also explored the relationship between leadership experiences and various measures of satisfaction and inclination to remain in service. The authors observe that despite the central role that the concept of leadership holds in the military, even senior personnel reported experiencing toxic leadership. There was a significant negative relationship between destructive leadership and all measures of satisfaction. Surprisingly, there was not a significant negative impact on inclination to remain in service among this career-oriented and dedicated population.
U.S. Military Academy, www.usma.edu/mission.aspx (accessed June 12, 2008).
2.
U.S. Air Force Academy, www.usafa.edu/indes.cfm?catname_Academy%20Info (accessed June 12, 2008).
3.
Department of the Army, FM 6-22 Leadership (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2006), viii.
4.
As of this writing, Secretary England is the deputy secretary of defense. He provided his philosophy of leadership at the United States Naval Academy’s Forrestal Lecture Series. The fifteen points are available at http://www.defenselink.mil/osd/topleaders.aspx (accessed June 8, 2008).
5.
Edgar E. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 31.
6.
Craig Bullis and George Reed, "Assessing Leaders to Establish and Maintain Positive Command Climate," A Report to the Secretary of the Army (February 2003). During our focus group interviews and in presentations since, most officers are able to relate stories of abuse at the hands of supervisors.
7.
George Reed , "Toxic Leadership," Military ReviewLXXVI (July-August 2004): 67.
8.
Blake Ashforth , "Petty Tyranny in Organizations," Human Relations47, 7 (July 1994): 775-78.
9.
The U.S. Army War College Web site indicates that "graduates will take leadership positions in brigade combat teams and Pentagon directorates, planning positions in US military headquarters worldwide, and senior management positions within departments of Defense, State, and multiple federal agencies," http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ (accessed June 10, 2008). An adage sometimes quipped at the Army War College says, "Just because you attend a joint or senior service college, does not mean that you will be a General, but you won’t be a General unless you attend a joint or senior service college."
10.
In a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support on March 13, 2008, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Richard Cody acknowledged that the demand for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply and called for enhanced incentives to meet retention goals. The prepared statement is available at http:// armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2008/April/Cody%2004-01-08.pdf.
11.
Jay Conger , "The Dark Side of Leadership," Organizational Dynamics19, 44 (1990): 55.
12.
Reed, "Toxic Leadership ," 67-71.
13.
Bennett J. Tepper, "Consequences of Abusive Supervision," Academy of Management Journal42, 2 (April 2000): 178-90.
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Kelly L. Zellars, Bennet J. Tepper, and Michelle K. Duffy, "Abusive Supervision and Subordinate’s Organizational Citizenship Behavior," Journal of Applied Psychology87, 6 (2002): 1068-76.
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John Schaubroek , Fred O. Walumbwa, Daniel C. Ganster, and Sven Kepes, "Destructive Leader Traits and the Neutralizing Influence of an ‘Enriched’ Job," Leadership Quarterly18 (2007): 236-51.
16.
Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters ( Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 11.
17.
Reed, "Toxic Leadership"; and Bullis and Reed, "Assessing Leaders."
18.
Bullis and Reed, "Assessing Leaders."
19.
Ashforth, "Petty Tyranny in Organizations."
20.
Kellerman, Bad Leadership.
21.
The students at the U.S. Army War College are notoriously overassessed due to an abundance of internal institutional assessment mechanisms including surveys issued to each attendee after each course of instruction and a battery of health and psychometric instruments. In light of this, we were pleased to obtain a 62 percent response rate.
22.
Ashforth, "Petty Tyranny in Organizations," 757.
23.
Bullis and Reed, "Assessing Leaders," 2.
24.
William D. Berry, Understanding Regression Assumptions (Newbury Park, CA : Sage, 1993), 47.
25.
Bullis and Reed, "Assessing Leaders"
26.
The mode of years in service of respondents in the Class of 2008 was twenty-two years (N = 37, 21.3 percent).
27.
Jean Lipman-Blumen , The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians-And How We Can Survive Them ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4-5.
28.
Robert I.Sutton, TheNo Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (New York: Warner Business Books , 2007).
29.
Emanuel Kant proffered that "man, and generally any other rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must always be regarded at the same time as an end." Kant’s's Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on The Theory of Ethics, translated by Thomas K. Abbott (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898).
30.
If personal experience with toxic leadership decreases with rank and position as we suggest, then there is a tendency for those who have the most power and authority to address the problem at the organizational level to believe that while it might have been a problem when they were junior officers, the situation is much better today. When "Toxic Leadership" appeared in a 2004 edition of Military Review, the author received hundreds of e-mails from midgrade officers (captains and majors) and little interest from those at more senior levels.
