‘Jekyll and Hyde’ leaders cause lasting damage, new study shows

The only thing worse than an abusive boss is one who thinks he can make up for his misdeeds by turning on a charm the next day. That’s a key finding from a new study by researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology: When leaders vacillate unexpectedly between good and bad behavior, employee morale and job performance plummet. This indicates that the value decreases to .

“We already know that abusive leadership causes significant harm to workers, but leaders who oscillate between abusive and ethical leadership do even more damage to employees. We now know that there are,” said study lead author Dr. Haoying Xu. He is also an assistant professor of management at the Stevens School of Business. “We found that returning to an ethical leadership style does not magically erase the effects of previous bad behavior and can actually make things worse in some situations.”

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, used surveys and field experiments to examine the effects of “Jekyll and Hyde” leadership on more than 650 full-time employees based in the United States and Europe. Dr. Xu’s team found that workers suffered when their boss was abusive, but even more so when their boss unexpectedly alternated between abusive and ethical leadership styles. It was discovered that there were negative effects.

“If you’re constantly guessing which boss will show up, good cop or bad cop, you’ll end up feeling mentally exhausted, demoralized, and unable to reach your full potential,” says Dr. Schuh. explains.

The new study also shows for the first time that “Jekyll and Hyde” leadership can cause serious harm even when employees are not directly affected by their leader’s repeated misconduct. The study found that when supervisors themselves alternate between abusive and ethical leadership, it creates additional uncertainty and undermines employees’ trust in their supervisors’ abilities.

“In today’s workplace, employees are very sensitive to their relationships with their managers and senior leaders,” says Dr. Hsu. “When that relationship becomes unpredictable, or when good and bad behavior occur repeatedly, it can cause serious problems for the entire team.”

For organizations, this research provides several important new insights. Most notable is the fact that leaders who try to make amends for intermittent misconduct often do real harm to their employees. “Organizations tend to intervene when a boss is consistently abusive, but are more tolerant of a leader whose abusive behavior only occurs occasionally,” says Dr. Schuh. “However, this study finds that intermittent fraud may actually be more harmful to organizations.”

To counter Jekyll-and-Hyde-like leadership, organizations should pay attention to employees who raise concerns and hold leaders accountable for sporadic abusive behavior, says Dr. Schuh. It may also be worth considering anger management coaching for leaders who are showing signs of instability. “This type of intermittent abusive leadership tends to be impulsive,” says Dr. Schuh. “This means there is scope to reduce or eliminate impatience by helping leaders manage it and improve impulse control.”

Dr. Hsu’s future research will explore how employees respond to and learn from Jekyll-and-Hyde-like leadership, and how regularly abusive leaders influence individual behavior and team dynamics. We would like to investigate whether it has such an effect. “There are some indications that this type of leadership can be contagious, where instability in leaders fosters instability in other leaders,” he says.

There is also some interesting early evidence that employees may be more likely to learn from and imitate their leaders’ bad behavior than to imitate their leaders’ good behavior. “If that’s the case, that would be another great reason for organizations to take Jekyll and Hyde leadership seriously,” warns Dr. Schuh.