ABSTRACT
Chapter 6: Culture describes the relationships between toxic leadership and organizational culture and climate. The authors define organizational culture and climate, describe how scholars have viewed the leader’s role in setting the culture and climate, then share research on toxic leadership and culture and climate. Culture relates to shared values, assumptions, and norms that form a basis for organizational identity, commitment, and action. Organizational cultures are grounded in history, tradition, and collective identity. Organizational climate is developed through shared experiences within an organization in terms of exposure to common structural characteristics, the norming of members through selection, attraction, attrition, and the social interactions that lead to shared meaning. While the two phenomena have similar characteristics, organizational climate is a more transient construct similar to the differences between personality and mood. Toxic leaders slowly poison the organizational climate and, if left unchecked, can destroy the culture. Toxic leadership outcomes include attrition, division of followers, inefficiency, lack of respect, lack of unit discipline, errors, snowball effects, and the firing of the toxic leader or followers. Toxic leaders may flourish in organizational cultures that have (a) a short-term focus, (b) hierarchical command structures, (c) strong silos, (d) protective organizational functions, (e) patriarchal forms, (f) weak cultures, (g) strong subcultures, and (h) weak feedback systems.
