Most people who have spent any time in the workforce can recall a boss for whom it was difficult to work. Perhaps you’re in this situation now. There is a difference between a bad boss and a toxic leader. Toxic leaders, as described by members of the United States Army in a recent National Public Radio story on the subject, are “…worse than incompetent bosses: They said toxic leaders were abusive and self-aggrandizing, arrogant and petty, and ‘unconcerned about, or oblivious to, staff or troop morale.’”

The effects of toxic leadership are manifold. In the minor cases, it can lead to employee attrition, general workplace dissatisfaction and hampered productivity. In the extreme cases, it can lead to workplace violence and suicide.

Military leaders, who control more aspects of the lives of the soldiers under them, including vertical and horizontal mobility, than most other bosses, can have particularly dramatic effects when they are among the toxic; life and death effects. Fortunately, the Army started to recognize that it may have a problem, and began asking difficult questions about itself. In 2003, retired Col. George Reed, who was director of Command and Leadership Studies at the War College found that not only were toxic leaders self-centered, but were good at getting promoted by fooling their superiors.

Toxic leadership, however, is not unique to the military. It can be found in any organization, whether military, paramilitary, public or private, for-profit and non-profit. And sometimes, structure and practice can perpetuate it. in most industries, performance is evaluated in a top-down fashion, putting leaders in control of the professional “destinies” of their subordinates. In corporate reporting structures that do not involve matrix reporting, reporting to a single individual provides an opportunity for toxicity to grow and survive. Negative leadership in these settings may produce short-term results, but long-term instability and problems.

Organizations without the institutional courage to deal with the issues leading to, or perpetuating toxic leadership, are destined to suffer it. As early 20th century philosopher George Santayana wrote in his work The Life of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Many organizations apparently haven’t heeded his sage observation.

George Santayana

The quadrennial cadence of political change in the federal government, particularly as it relates to appointees, seems to contribute to either radical reorganizations or complete inaction, often driven by individuals. The retention of career employees can reduce the loss of institutional knowledge, or perpetuate toxic cultures as new appointees arrive and leaders try to curry favor from appointees while insulating communication from below about real issues. Politics and desire for personal political ascendance, in the context of these four-year windows, impact individual motivation and potentially contribute to toxic leadership.

For three years running, the Department of Homeland Security has the dubious honor of being the lowest ranked large department in the 2014 Best Places To Work in the Federal Government Survey conducted by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. There are many different reasons for the low rankings, the most common being leadership problems. While the survey identified issues of weak leadership at DHS, there are many indications of toxic leadership problems as well. Similar to the Army, which found itself studying the issues of toxic leadership in 2003, and again in 2010, having failed to solve the problem, DHS has conducted three different surveys, at considerable cost, to try to understand why the department is such a font of poor morale. The findings beg the question of whether individual characters or organizational structures drive these issues, a question it seems, that will be answered by another study.

Interestingly, a David Sloan Wilson Forbes article from January, 2014 goes beyond personality and structural contributors to toxic leadership, right to DNA.

Wilson links evolutionary self-aggrandizing and self-centered behaviors to survival instincts among members of the animal kingdom. Wilson’s research supports the notion that humans, unlike other animals, have mitigated much of this behavior through societal structures and interpersonal cultural norms such as egalitarianism and moral frames. Unfortunately, however, we haven’t mitigated or eradicated all of it.

Many bureaucratic structures that have historically worked to keep organizations, well…organized, are among the implements toxic leaders use to gain and maintain their influence. It is important in understanding the behavior of toxic leaders, to remember that first and foremost, these people are self-serving. Co-workers and subordinates are potential competitors and as such, must be kept from growing in status, influence or mobility.

A recent Inc. article from Lolly Daskal describes eight ways of killing employee motivation. Two of the eight are bad leadership and toxic people, obviously germane to the current discussion. The others represent leadership shortcomings and levers that toxic leaders use to keep others around them down, minimizing the potential for these leaders to lose control. The focus on personal gain for them and status quo for everyone else, contributes to a lack of organizational vision, because vision can be scary for toxic leaders. The status quo is known and it is easier to plan for and control than a more unknown future that may come with vision. Daskal recognizes this lack of vision and failing to recognize employees- common among toxic leaders, as other ways of killing motivation. Matsuda’s reports to the Army attributed more serious problems than merely loss of motivation and employee satisfaction, to toxic work environments, although both are common within them as well. In the most extreme cases, soldiers felt a sense of hopelessness that contributed to their suicides or suicide attempts.

R. Lee Ermey, as the punishing Marine drill sergeant from the film Full Metal Jacket

In 2010, the U.S. Army solicited the help of a cultural anthropologist to investigate the rash of suicides and attempted suicides among soldiers in Iraq, to try to understand how to address the issue. The army put anthropologist and cultural advisor to the U.S. military, Dr. David Matsuda on the case, to study why almost 30 soldiers in Iraq had committed or attempted suicides in the past year. He studied Army suicides in depth and reported that “[S]uicidal behavior can be triggered by a… toxic command climate.”

A toxic command climate has been a contributing factor to many of these military suicides, and the clustering of them may have a social scientific explanation. In his 2000 book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes how suicide can become a “social epidemic.” The imitative qualities of people, and the removal of perceived social stigmas can lead others to emulate behaviors of people in their social circles when it comes to suicide. One person engaging in an act such as suicide can provide tacit permission for others to do the same, by removing the taboo. This is one potential explanation for the seemingly “infectious” nature of suicide. Once one person takes the step of committing suicide, an act clearly discouraged by cultural norms, it can have the effect of both making the behavior seem acceptable as a solution, and of making people feel like their own situations are more dire when people “better off” than they are, resort to suicide.

The effects of toxic leadership are like a cancer. They can be insidious and damaging, slowly killing an organization and its people literally and figuratively. These effects are exacerbated by the imitative nature of people that Gladwell describes. Behavior modeling can perpetuate toxic leadership, particularly within organizations where toxic leaders attain positions of power, authority and prestige. People see bad behavior rewarded, leading them to emulate toxic leaders for their own personal gains, the striving for which is quite human. Imitation can also exacerbate the cancerous effects of toxic leadership among groups of people in less overt but contagious behaviors and mindsets, leading to group physical and emotional stress, depression, and suicide when people feel they have no recourse against unjust leaders.