Good Leadership Failures And Bad Leadership Surprises: A Leadership Literature Typology

Leadership is important for organizations and intriguing for scholars. In leadership literature, leader behaviors have either been classified as universally ‘good’ leader behaviors or ‘bad’ leader behaviors. However, recent studies suggest that exhibiting ‘good’ leader behaviors may also result in undesirable outcomes and vice versa. These finding are an anomaly in literature and require a deeper inquiry and integration with the rest of the leader behavior literature. To that end, this article attempts to provide a synthesis of the leader behavior literature. Utilizing a hedonic valence-based framework, we attempt to integrate the different types of leader behaviors and their consequent outcomes. To achieve this, we define two new constructs, namely “Leader Behavioral Valence" and “Net Outcomes". We utilize these constructs to categorize leader behaviors into four subfields i.e. traditional positive leadership, negative destructive leadership, positive behaviors resulting in negative outcomes and negative behaviors resulting in positive outcomes. We identify two sub-fields which have not received significant scholarly attention.