OML 6300 Module 1 Module Paper: Why a Sales Team Followed a Toxic Vice President Example

Numbers, Fear and the Need to Belong: Why a Sales Team Followed a Toxic Vice President

Student Name

M.S. in Management in Organizational Leadership, Thomas Edison State University

OML-6300: Contemporary Issues in Leadership

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Numbers, Fear and the Need to Belong: Why a Sales Team Followed a Toxic Vice President

Introduction

For four years I worked for a vice president of sales I will call Grant. Under Grant, our eastern division beat its revenue targets every quarter. Under Grant, two of my colleagues left the industry, one was hospitalized for stress, and the company later paid to take back millions of dollars of inventory that customers had been pushed to buy. Most of us stayed loyal to him until the day he left. This paper asks how that was possible, using Lipman-Blumen (2005), research on destructive leadership and my own experience.

Defining Toxic Leadership

Lipman-Blumen (2005) defines toxic leaders as individuals who, by virtue of their destructive behaviors and dysfunctional personal qualities, inflict serious and enduring harm on their followers, their organizations and others. Her definition focuses on harm that is serious and lasting, not on a single bad day or a demanding style. She lists behaviors such as misleading followers, playing them against one another, stifling criticism and violating basic standards of integrity, and personal qualities such as arrogance, a lack of integrity and insatiable ambition.

Einarsen et al. (2007) offered a broader definition of destructive leadership as systematic and repeated behavior that violates the legitimate interest of the organization by undermining its goals, resources or effectiveness, or by harming subordinates' motivation, well-being or job satisfaction. Their model separates leaders who harm subordinates while serving the organization's goals, a pattern they call tyrannical, from those who harm both.

Grant fits the tyrannical pattern at first glance: he harmed people while delivering results. But the channel stuffing, pushing pharmacy and hospital customers to buy more inventory than they needed so the quarter would close strong, harmed the organization too, borrowing future sales and damaging customer trust. By both definitions, he was toxic.

Why We Followed Him

Lipman-Blumen's central argument is that followers tolerate toxic leaders not only out of fear but because of psychological needs the leaders satisfy. She points to a need for reassuring authority figures, a need for security and certainty, a need to feel chosen or special and to belong, a fear of ostracism and a sense of powerlessness to challenge the leader. Each appeared on our team.

First, Grant offered certainty in an uncertain industry. Pharmaceutical distribution was consolidating, and several competitors had laid off sales staff. Grant's message, that our division would survive because it won, was reassuring. Second, he made people feel chosen. Reps who hit their numbers were invited to his "inner circle" dinners, and being included felt like protection. Third, we feared ostracism: the reps he turned against were isolated, and others avoided them for fear of being associated. Finally, we felt powerless. Grant reported directly to the president, who praised the division's results at every company meeting.

I was one of the chosen. I hit my numbers, attended the dinners and told myself that Grant's methods were tough but fair. Looking back, I joined in the silence that let him harm others.

The Toxic Triangle

Padilla et al. (2007) argue that destructive leadership requires three elements: a destructive leader, susceptible followers and a conducive environment. Grant supplied the first. The followers were of two kinds the authors describe: conformers, who go along out of fear or unmet needs, and colluders, who actively participate because they share the leader's ambitions. Most of the team were conformers; two senior reps who benefited from the quarter-end pushes were colluders. The colluders mattered more than their number suggests: they made Grant's methods seem normal, and new reps learned from them what success looked like.

The environment completed the triangle. Padilla and colleagues name the conditions that let destructive leaders thrive: instability, a sense of threat, cultural respect for strong authority and missing checks and balances. Our industry's consolidation created instability and threat. The company's culture rewarded quarterly revenue above all. And there were few checks: no one outside the division reviewed order patterns, and the president saw only the totals. In the meta-analysis by Schyns and Schilling (2013), destructive leadership was strongly associated with negative attitudes toward the leader and with counterproductive work behavior, and also with lower job satisfaction and well-being; our division's turnover, double the company average, fit that pattern, though our revenue hid it.

How Grant's Leadership Ended

Grant left after an audit by our largest customer, a regional hospital system, found that it held nine months of inventory on some products and that its buyers had been offered rebates tied to quarter-end volumes. The company took back the excess and lost the account's preferred status. Grant resigned. Within a year, half of the reps he had ranked at the bottom were among the division's top performers under a new leader, which suggests their earlier results reflected his methods more than their ability.

The Cost Hidden by the Numbers

The division's revenue made Grant look like an asset. A fuller accounting tells a different story. Replacing a sales rep costs our company about $60,000 in recruiting, training and lost sales during ramp-up, and the division lost nine reps in four years beyond its normal turnover. The returned inventory and rebates cost about $3.2 million, and the hospital system's lost preferred status cost more in the following year than Grant's best quarter had gained. The meta-analysis by Schyns and Schilling helps explain why such costs stay hidden: the outcomes most strongly linked to destructive leadership, such as followers' attitudes toward the leader and counterproductive behavior, rarely appear in the measures organizations report.

Recommendations

For followers, Lipman-Blumen urges people to recognize the needs that bind them to toxic leaders, to find support among peers and to act, by speaking up, building coalitions or leaving. I would add one practical step: write down what you see as it happens. If several of us had kept notes on the forecast pressure and taken them together to human resources, we would have been harder to dismiss.

For the organization, the toxic triangle suggests that the environment is the easiest element to change. The company has since made three changes I support and would extend:

I would also recommend training for new managers on recognizing destructive patterns in their own leaders and in themselves, since Lipman-Blumen notes that many toxic leaders do not see themselves as harmful.

Conclusion

Grant was toxic by any definition: he harmed his followers and, through the quarter-end pushes, his organization. We followed him because he met our needs for certainty, belonging and protection, because we feared ostracism and because the company's environment rewarded his results without checking his methods. Lipman-Blumen's insight is that toxic leadership is a relationship in which followers participate. My own participation is the lesson I take from this module: the next time I see a leader harming people for results, I will not wait for an audit to end it.

References

Einarsen, S., Aasland, M. S., & Skogstad, A. (2007). Destructive leadership behaviour: A definition and conceptual model. Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 207-216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.002

Lipman-Blumen, J. (2005). The allure of toxic leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians, and how we can survive them. Oxford University Press.

Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001

Schyns, B., & Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. Leadership Quarterly, 24(1), 138-158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.09.001