Emma Gerittsen & Djurre Holtrop

Destructive leadership behaviors have serious consequences for both organizations and employees, yet their emergence remains largely understudied. Current research predominantly focuses on the employee’s perspective, offering a limited view of how destructive leadership behaviors arise. To develop a more comprehensive understanding, it is crucial to also consider the leader’s perspective. Given the scarcity of research from this viewpoint, we employed a qualitative approach to explore how leaders retrospectively make sense of their destructive leadership behaviors. We conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with leaders from diverse hierarchical levels and industries in the Netherlands. Using the Gioia methodology, we developed a theoretical model explaining destructive leadership behaviors based on the leader’s viewpoint. Our findings reveal that leaders often navigate conflicting demands from organizational, team, employee, and personal interests, and frequently rationalize their destructive actions as necessary responses to these pressures. Furthermore, specific factors within leaders’ subjective realities—such as work stressors, value-based discrepancies, and perceived performance deficiencies—contribute to enabling these behaviors. Compared to the employee-focused view, our study provides unique insights into how leaders reflect on their own shortcomings and misperceptions that partially explain their engagement in destructive behaviors. By integrating the leader’s perspective, our study shifts the focus from static, trait-based explanations to a more dynamic understanding of how destructive leadership behaviors emerge, offering new insights for both research and practice.