Dominance and the dark side of educational leadership
Dual strategies theory has been largely neglected so far yet has much to offer educational practitioners and researchers
Overview
This blog defines toxic and destructive leadership in the context of education, and suggests that both concepts may in fact differ only in degree and that they are linked underpinned by over-application of a dominance based leadership strategy. The post then shows some evidence that dual strategies theory has been underutilized in educational leadership research, and concludes by showing some insights from dual strategies theory. Future posts will explore individual aspects of this in more detail.
Leaving La-la land
A fundamental, if often neglected, truth in educational leadership and management is that it is better to see things as they are rather than how we wish them to be. Yet all too often the rosy glow of idealism that can surround practitioner and researcher discussions of leadership and management obscures a darker reality that in some cases leader toxicity and destructive tendencies can have extremely negative consequences for individuals, organizational culture, and wider society. Considering the costs for ignoring this issue are so severe, we would be wise to shine some light on the dark side of educational leadership.
Toxic leadership
“Behaviour which is exploitative, abusive, destructive and psychologically-and perhaps legalistically- corrupt and poisonous” (Walton, 2007, p20)
Toxic leadership focuses on short-term, and often short sighted, goals over the longer term health of their school. Toxic leaders corrupt the leader-follower relationship for their own ends and therefore leave their schools in a worse state than before their tenure began. Most disturbingly, toxic school leaders are often unaware of the full impact of their actions and can have a longitudinal effect far beyond their school by grooming the next generation of toxic school leaders through playing favourites amongst staff members and furthering the careers of those who seek to work around, or even worse emulate, their toxic behaviours (Craig, 2018) . While long lasting, the effects of the toxic leader on schools and other organizations is slower than that of the closely related concept of destructive leadership.
Destructive leadership
“Behavior by a leader that can harm or intends to harm a leader’s organization and/or followers by (a) encouraging followers to pursue goals that contravene the legitimate interests of the organization and/or (b) employing a leadership style that involves the use of harmful methods of influence with followers, regardless of justifications for such behavior.”, (Krasikova, Green and LeBreton, 2013 p1310)
Destructive leadership overlaps with toxic leadership in certain ways and while some authors do make a distinction between the two including destructive leadership having a much faster impact (Craig, 2017 p183-184) , or destructive leaders having higher rates of narcissism than toxic ones (Milosevic, Maric and Lončar, 2020 p16-17) , it does seem likely that the difference between toxic and destructive leadership is essentially only one of degree. Furthermore, the same underpinning mechanism is at work throughout the dark side of leadership (Campbell, 2021 p23-5). The question then becomes ‘what would that underlying concept be?’ and where better to look than the most primordial status climbing strategies of them all, dual strategies theory?
Dual strategies theory
Beginning in 2001 (Henrich and Gil-White, 2001) but with deep roots in a variety of disciplines, dual strategies theory focuses on two evolved strategies for gaining status in human groups called dominance and prestige (Maner, 2017). Unique to humans, prestige can most simply be defined as the leader being given status by others in exchange for leader expertise which contrasts sharply with dominance where the leader takes status through force or coercion (Henrich and Gil-White, 2001). While almost all effective leaders will at certain times display aspects of a dominance based strategy, what concerns us is an overly dominant leadership approach that ultimately harms the school, those that work there, and seems to overlap completely with toxic and destructive leadership (Campbell, 2021). Despite being naturally present in all human groups (Brand and Mesoudi, 2019) the two strategies have been largely ignored in educational leadership research with a search of two databases revealing not even one study (Campbell, 2021 p56-7). The more practitioner facing literature is not much better with one article on this topic appearing in the TES three years ago, but we won’t count that as I wrote it. Yet ignoring dual strategies theory is a huge mistake as the literature has much to teach us about the conditions that lead to the darker aspects of leader behavior and what tactics they use to get their way.
Dark side tricks and tactics
Future posts will explore the tactics of the dark side leader in more detail, but in the meantime some of the more standard ones are listed below, and grouped under sub-headings to identify the most likely cause:
Caused by leader positional insecurity
Targeting talented subordinates (Mead and Maner, 2012)
Undermining group cohesion (Case and Maner, 2014)
Use of “divide and conquer” by using complaisance (pleasing) tactics with some followers while attacking others. (Ketterman and Maner, 2021)
Caused by leader pursuing personal goals
Use of coercion (Maner, 2017)
Use of intimidation, aggression, manipulation of reward and punishment e.g.:
manipulating performance evaluations or references (Maner, and Case, 2016)
Misappropriation of organizational resources for personal gain (Ronay, Maddux and von Hippel, 2020)
Use of unethical practices to achieve performance goals (Schweitzer, Ordóñez and Douma, 2004)
Conclusion
If there will be an underlying theme in this blog (and not just in this post), it will be that I find there is often potential value in looking beyond educational practice to look at how other organizations and literatures have attempted to define and solve similar problems. The next post will look at some of the psychological principles behind making predictions, and how they have potential to help create better educational policy.