External Toxic Manipulative Leadership

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Ygnacio “Nash” Flores
October 4, 2024

Leadership inherently involves the art of manipulation. Manipulation is a double-edged sword. When goals and values align with ethics and morality, few question the manipulative mechanisms at play in leadership. Even the best leaders in history fell victim to their manipulative behavior. Failure to support overarching goals results in being removed from positions due to decisions not aligning with higher levels of leadership. Examples of great leaders unseated from power due to leadership based on toxic manipulation are Generals Patton and McArthur, whose influences were detrimental to larger overarching goals and objectives.

Manipulation within the realm of leadership includes various forms of influencing people to do other than what they may have originally intended to do. Manipulation can draw the best performance from a future leader when developing promising people to help them do better. This behavior finds value in business, public service, sports teams and other organizations where development is a primary operating purpose of leadership. The traits of these leaders are varied and valued, and they serve as the foundation of many how-to books on leadership.

Toxic manipulation occurs when the leader has ulterior motives and leads others down a destructive path. The case of Enron in 2001 and its fraud in accounting demonstrates how leaders enabled business practices to cross the legal lines of business. Manipulation of others, resulting in a moral shift based on the leader’s influence, is the worst-case example of toxic manipulation. An example is the leadership of Jim Jones, a cult leader of the Peoples Temple, who was responsible for over 900 deaths by murder and suicide in 1978. Followers of the Aum Shinryko, a Japanese cult, used sarin gas to attack and kill 13 people in a Tokyo subway station in 1995. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was also charged with killing others in Japan, wishing to shed light on the cult’s destructive nature—the cult aimed to start a Third World War, leading to an apocalypse. A couple of years later, in 1997, Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite led the religious movement called Heaven’s Gate. Through toxic manipulation, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate group simultaneously committed suicide as they awaited the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet. There is little value found in directing others to take their lives or the lives of others for a purpose the rest of society sees as abhorrent.     

The next type of toxic manipulative leadership is what many leaders face during their tenure—the forces of subordinate and external toxic manipulative leadership. Focusing on the toxicity of manipulative leadership from forces outside the official chain of command that seek to influence the official decision-making process can reduce productivity and organizational morale. This form of influence is called external toxic manipulative leadership (ETML). ETML questions whether subordinate or external leaders believe their voice equals 51 percent of a non-existent vote.

Toxicity is created when manipulative leaders seek to advance limited, parochial issues over the best interests of the organization’s leaders or goals. Justification for manipulating the decision-making process can lie in limited and selfish gains linked to populist ideas. The relational phenomenon of shifting power in complex relationships requires a leader—especially public leaders—to balance on the razor’s edge. In shared governance, the leader must be cautious about being led astray by people exercising EMTL. What is interesting about this relationship is that shared governance does not always equate to sharing responsibility and accountability of action. Overarching in EMTL is the driving force of opinion over logic in the decision-making matrix. Herein, the exclusion in supporting misdirected subordinate ideology is penalized as having no logical basis as a value point, thus invoking the philosophy of diminutiveness, where people create value in hedonistic pursuits by diminutive perspectives of the limited world they create.

For instance, organizations that practice forms of shared governance must balance administrative goals and needs against official and non-official representative groups. This practice is only sometimes beneficial to the organization. An example of an official representative group is a union representing a select organization population. It is not unusual to think of the relationship between leadership and labor as manipulative conflict in action, as shown in negotiations where toxicity creates manipulative leaders attempting to influence outcomes for limited purposes. Like the proverbial squeaky wheel, the direction of minority interests demands the grease at the expense of the majority interests.    

The impact of ETML creates the phenomena of anti-leadership. Those exercising ETML have the luxury of impacting decisions other leaders make sans the responsibility or accountability of the recognized leader, such as an administrator or manager who can lose their positions for being derelict in their duties. Additionally, elected leaders often find their decisions shaped by players in the public arena and media that seek to influence decision-making in the hopes of clicks, likes, reposts and favored exposure amongst netizens is more viable than efficiency or effectiveness. For elected leaders, this can shape decision-making to get votes at the expense of the constituency’s needs. The crux of this article calls for more research on the peripheral factors influencing leadership in action.

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Author: Dr. Ygnacio “Nash” Flores is a professor of Administration of Justice and Homeland Security at Rio Hondo College.

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