Sectoral Differences in the Perception of Toxic Leadership

Toxic leadership has become the focus of attention in recent years for many organizations. In general terms, toxic leadership refers to leader behaviors leading to negative outcomes. Toxic leadership can result in decreasing personnel efficiency and adversely affecting cost-benefit relationship for organizations. Simultaneously, this concept is alleged to cause high rates of absenteeism, increasing personnel transfer, poor performance and groupthink. Despite the growing interest in the world of science, it is observed that systematic, scientific field works on toxic leadership are inadequate. Lack of fieldwork data can be considered as an important challenge to define the concept of toxic leadership properly.The purpose of this study is to test compliance of dimensions and scale in toxic leadership model developed by Çelebi et al. (2015) in Turkey. For this purpose, it was investigated whether there is a difference in the validity of the model according to the product and service sector. Automotive manufacturing sector was chosen in physical product industry and hospitality sector was chosen in the service industry. A questionnaire was conducted on 385 people, including 204 people from automotive manufacturing and 181 people from hospitality sector. Confirmatory factor analysis in Lisrel program was conducted to test the scale and t-test was performed for the cross-sectoral differences. The results showed that toxic leadership is defined by 5 dimensions and there are various differences between the sectors.