Poisonous management behavior prevails in almost nine out of ten companies. That harms the working atmosphere and the performance of the staff.
Bosses who publicly yell at their people, insult or ignore them with comments do a lot of damage. Because such hostile leadership behavior leaves unsatisfied employees behind. It causes stress and leads to reduced work performance and low loyalty to the company.
A research team from three universities has now examined these relationships in more detail using Kununu data. Kununu is a European online platform specializing in employer reviews.
37,308 quantitative assessments and 3,725 text comments submitted by employees from 148 companies were evaluated for the study.
Comments like “The line manager tries to give the employee the feeling that he can do nothing” occur relatively often. Only 18 of the companies examined were clear: there was no evidence of toxic behavior by executives.
Devaluation of the employer
On the other hand, toxic management behavior occurs in 85 percent of companies. In every fifth company, the management climate is extremely poisoned. These are terrifying results of the research project at Bielefeld University, the Berlin School of Economics and Law, and Trier University.
Toxic leadership has been shown to worsen the climate. Anyone who works there clearly devalues their employer. Companies in which toxic behavior is more common often receive poor marks.
With an average of 3.3, they rate their employees statistically significantly worse than employers, for whom this behavior is rare. These cut off with 3.5. The higher the employee satisfaction, the higher the company’s performance.
The research team identifies the causes for a pronouncedly poisoned management culture in the entire management: The toxic behavior is carried over from the top, i.e. the board of directors and management, to the lower management levels. Hostility is thus inherited.
Make abuses in leadership behavior visible
The harmful consequences: unattractive employers scare off applicants, employees submit their (internal) resignations, commitment and performance potential decrease, and the company as a whole is less productive and can more easily get into economic difficulties.
“Hardly any other factor has such a big impact on job satisfaction as the relationship with the manager,” explains Yenia Zaba, Director of Global Communications & Brand at Kununu. An open and transparent feedback culture, which is characterized by mutual trust, gives companies the opportunity to be made aware of deficiencies in management behavior and to actively address them.
According to the researchers, toxic leadership is equally pronounced in family and non-family businesses. In principle, no one can afford to endure or ignore bad managers, ”says Kai Bormann, Junior Professor at Bielefeld University. “And that is especially true in the financial sense.”
And colleague Christina Hoon draws attention to a disparity: Almost every medium-sized or larger company has now formulated management guidelines. “They sound great, but they also suggest that everything is in order in the world of leadership.” Companies should check whether and how this “normative self-image” of leadership actually affects everyday work.
This goes hand in hand with the question of whether companies have established sanction or incentive systems for “good leadership” and whether “bad leadership” is consistently punished.
