Toxic Leadership. An Evolutionary Perspective

In an attempt to understand and explain toxic leadership, a predominant phenomenon in both public and private organizations, the paper proposes an evolutionary approach. The evolutionary theory offers nowadays the foundations of at least four disciplines that attempt to explain human behaviours as evolutionary adaptations (or maladaptations) to the natural and/or social environment: human sociobiology, human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics and gene–culture coevolution theory. According to gene–culture coevolution theory, articulated language was the singular phenomenon that permitted humans to become a cultural species, culture becoming itself a selection factor. Culture means transmission of information from one generation to the next and learning from other individuals’ experiences, trough language. So, it is of critical importance to have good criteria for the selection of those individuals from whom we should learn. Yet when humans also choose their leaders from among those role-models, according to the same criteria, this mechanism can become a maladaptation and the result can be toxic leadership.