Meta-Analysis of Destructive Leadership and Its Outcomes
This paper critically reviews Schyns and Schilling's 2013 meta-analysis, "How Bad Are the Effects of Bad Leaders?" published in The Leadership Quarterly. The review summarizes the study's core finding — that destructive leadership significantly correlates with negative follower attitudes and counterproductive workplace behavior — before evaluating its methodological strengths and limitations. The paper praises the study's clear definitional framework and coding approach while critiquing its lack of an exacting analytical structure and its omission of qualitative methods. It concludes with a discussion of how the findings might be applied in reverse to promote positive leadership practices and suggests directions for future research.
- Overview of the Study: Summary of study's purpose and methodology
- Strengths of the Meta-Analysis: Definitional clarity and coding strengths praised
- Critical Weaknesses and Limitations: Methodological gaps and missing qualitative depth
- Application of Findings: Reverse-applying findings to promote positive leadership
- Directions for Future Research: Longitudinal and hypothesis-driven research suggested
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper maintains a clear evaluative structure — essence, strengths, criticisms, and application — that guides readers logically through a complete critical analysis.
- Criticisms are specific and grounded in the source material, referencing page numbers and methodological concerns rather than offering vague disapproval.
- The application section demonstrates higher-order thinking by proposing how the study's findings could be practically used in reverse to encourage positive leadership behaviors.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates source critique through a structured book/article review format. The writer moves beyond summary to evaluate methodological choices — for example, questioning the partially collaborative coding process and the exclusion of qualitative data — showing awareness of how research design decisions shape the reliability and scope of findings.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into four labeled sections: Essence (summary), Strengths, Criticism, and Application. Each section builds on the previous one, progressing from neutral description to evaluative analysis and finally to practical and future-oriented reflection. This structure mirrors a standard article critique format used in graduate-level leadership and organizational behavior courses.
Overview of the Study
The article under review is "How Bad Are the Effects of Bad Leaders? A Meta-Analysis of Destructive Leadership and Its Outcomes," by Birgit Schyns and Jan Schilling, published in The Leadership Quarterly, 24 (2013), pp. 138–158. The central finding of the article is that there is a significant correlation between destructive leadership and the attitudes of followers toward the leader, as well as counterproductive work behavior. The study demonstrates that bad leadership can cripple a workplace environment and organizational culture, lower morale, reduce productivity, and foster negative attitudes among employees. This finding is important because it reinforces the argument that positive leadership is invaluable for an organization and that, as Sanders (2006) notes in his study on workplace environments, likeability in managers is a major factor in successful organizations.
The study conducts a literature review of over 200 prior studies, utilizing 57 of them for meta-analysis. Through this process, the researchers identified correlations between destructive leadership and various dependent variables, such as attitude, workplace behavior, productivity, and individual performance. The study focuses on destructive leadership rather than positive leadership in order to fill a gap in the available literature on leadership effects in the workplace.
Strengths of the Meta-Analysis
The focus on "the dark side of leadership" is especially helpful for highlighting the costs of poor leadership (Schyns & Schilling, 2013, p. 138). By identifying the negative impacts of poor leadership in organizations, the study implies that positive leadership is all the more important in order to avoid such pitfalls as loss of morale, productivity, and discipline. To underscore its objective, the study defines destructive leadership and discusses various types of leadership that might be incorporated in future analyses, such as non-leadership, negative leadership, and supportive-disloyal leadership. Leadership styles, the authors suggest, can be complex arrangements of both positive and negative qualities and characteristics. To this end, the researchers use "verbal, non-verbal, and physical behavior" cues to form the parameters by which they assess destructive leadership (p. 142). This is one of the strengths of the article because it clearly defines "destructive leadership," giving readers a precise understanding of the characteristics and qualities under analysis.
Another strength of the study is its theoretical framework, which adopts the "followers' point-of-view" and focuses on "follower-related outcomes" (p. 142). The study also notes that outcomes can be defined in a variety of ways, including "leader-related concepts, job-related concepts, organization-related concepts, and individual follower-related concepts" (p. 142). Each of these relates to outcomes affected by destructive leadership. As a result, the study incorporates all of these concepts into its overall meta-analysis as it attempts to identify correlations. In defining each concept along with its associated qualities and characteristics, the study provides useful parameters to guide future workplace and leadership research.
In summary, the main strength of this study is its thoroughness in defining its subject, providing adequate definitions of terms, approaches, and categories for assessment.
The study's method of coding destructive leadership is also a notable strength, as it explicitly shows how frequently specific qualities appeared among 104 articles found in PsychINFO. The term "abusive supervision," for instance, was recorded in 46 of the 104 articles, while "negative leadership" appeared in 13. At the same time, the method for correlating and analyzing the study's variables involved both researchers working together on two-thirds of the literature and separately on one-third. This approach is somewhat questionable, as it suggests a degree of qualitative judgment was embedded in what is nominally a quantitative meta-analysis — correlation being partly dependent on each researcher's ability to assign a relationship between the independent and dependent variables in each case.
References
Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches. CA: Sage.
Denscombe, M. (2010). Good Research Guide. UK: Open University Press.
Lin, C. (2013). Revealing the "essence" of things: Using phenomenology in LIS research. Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML), 4, 469–478.
Lovas, M., & Holloway, P. (2009). Axis of Influence: How Credibility and Likeability Intersect to Drive Success. Garden City, NY: Morgan James Publishing.
Pink, D. H. (2011). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
Sanders, T. (2006). The Likeability Factor. NY: Three Rivers Press.
Schyns, B., & Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 24, 138–158.
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