Toxic Leadership: 6 Traps EHS Must Challenge

Toxic leadership is a pattern of management behavior that creates psychosocial risk through fear, humiliation, excessive pressure, retaliation, or chronic insecurity. In 2024/2025, HSE reported 964,000 UK workers suffering work-related stress, depression or anxiety, and this article shows six traps EHS managers must challenge before leadership behavior becomes normalized harm.

Why is toxic leadership a psychosocial risk, not just a personality problem?

Toxic leadership is a psychosocial risk because repeated management behavior can change workload, control, support, role clarity, relationships, and reporting confidence, which are all conditions that shape mental health and safety at work. HSE reports 964,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in Great Britain in 2024/2025, so treating harmful leadership as a private style issue leaves a major exposure outside the risk-management system.

The practical mistake is waiting for a formal complaint before acting. By the time an EHS manager receives a written complaint, the site may already have months of silent signals in turnover, absence, overtime, near-miss quality, and failed escalation. That is why toxic leadership belongs beside psychosocial risk audits in industrial plants, not only beside HR conduct files.

As Andreza Araujo argues in Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice, culture appears in repeated decisions, not in declared values. A leader who humiliates people after bad news teaches the workforce that image is safer than truth, and that lesson can weaken both mental health and high-risk work control.

1. Trap: calling pressure high performance

Pressure becomes toxic when leaders turn every target into urgency, every delay into personal failure, and every resource constraint into a test of loyalty. The World Health Organization states that 15% of working-age adults were estimated to have a mental disorder in 2019, while depression and anxiety cost the global economy 12 billion working days and US$1 trillion each year. WHO explains that excessive workloads, low job control, and poor working environments are mental-health risks.

The myth underneath this trap is that intense pressure proves commitment. In more than 250 cultural-transformation projects supported by Andreza Araujo's team, a recurring pattern appears: people can sustain demanding work when priorities, staffing, competence, and decision rights are clear, although they deteriorate when leaders ask for impossible delivery and then describe the consequence as weak attitude.

An EHS manager should audit pressure through evidence, not opinion. Compare planned staffing against actual staffing for the last 30 days, count overtime peaks, review rejected stop-work decisions, and ask supervisors which controls became negotiable when output was late. If the same team misses breaks, extends shifts, and closes actions without verification, pressure is no longer a motivational style.

2. Trap: using fear as a fast control

Fear can create short-term obedience, but it destroys the early reporting that prevents serious events. ISO 45003:2021 specifies guidance for managing psychosocial risk within an occupational health and safety management system, and its 23-page scope includes work organization, social factors, and the work environment. ISO specifies that psychosocial risk should be managed through the same system logic used for other OH&S risks, which means fear-based leadership needs controls, owners, and verification.

Fear looks efficient because the meeting becomes quiet and decisions move faster. The hidden cost is information loss. Workers stop mentioning fatigue, equipment weakness, conflicting procedures, or doubts about a permit because the safest social move is to agree and leave the room. That pattern connects directly with organizational silence in safety, where quiet compliance can mask unstable work.

Across 25+ years leading EHS at multinationals, Andreza Araujo has observed that fear rarely announces itself as a formal hazard. It appears as clean dashboards, low challenge, scripted meetings, and incident reports that avoid leadership conditions. The control is to measure response quality after bad news: who spoke, what changed, who owned the answer, and whether the messenger suffered a visible penalty.

3. Trap: reducing toxic leadership to one bad manager

A toxic manager may be visible, but the larger risk often sits in the system that tolerates, rewards, or protects the behavior. ILO Convention 190, adopted in 2019, defines violence and harassment in the world of work as unacceptable behaviors and practices that can result in physical, psychological, sexual, or economic harm. ILO defines the scope broadly, including work-related communications, travel, training, and social activities linked with work.

The trap matters because organizations often remove one leader and leave the incentives untouched. If promotion still rewards production recovery at any cost, if complaints disappear in informal mediation, or if senior leaders praise a manager for delivering numbers while ignoring the climate underneath, the next leader learns the same lesson.

During the PepsiCo South America tenure, where the accident ratio fell 50% in six months, Andreza Araujo learned that leadership behavior had to be visible in routines, not only values. For toxic leadership, that means reviewing performance criteria, escalation paths, and manager consequences. A culture cannot claim care while preserving a leadership model that makes people choose between dignity and employment.

4. Trap: treating silence as proof that nothing is wrong

Silence is weak evidence of safety because people may stay quiet when reporting feels useless, risky, or socially expensive. EU-OSHA reported that ESENER 2019 collected responses from 45,420 workplaces in 33 countries, and the survey exists because workplace risk management has to be measured through real organizational practice, not assumptions. EU-OSHA reports that the survey asks people who know how safety and health are managed inside their organization.

Toxic leadership uses silence as a shield. A manager says there are no complaints, no conflicts, and no resistance, although workers may be protecting themselves from retaliation or social exclusion. The same logic appears in remote-work boundary myths, where low visibility can be mistaken for low risk.

The control is to triangulate silence. Review exit interview themes, absence spikes, safety-observation detail, near-miss descriptions, pulse-survey comments, overtime concentration, and informal reports from worker representatives. A single clean channel proves little, and five quiet channels around the same leader prove that the organization may have trained people not to speak.

5. How should EHS and HR separate tough leadership from toxic leadership?

EHS and HR should separate tough leadership from toxic leadership by testing whether the leader raises standards while preserving dignity, control clarity, recovery time, and the right to report risk. A tough leader can insist on compliance with ISO 45001-style controls, stop weak work, and demand evidence within 24 hours. A toxic leader uses standards as weapons, turns questions into disloyalty, and makes fear part of the operating rhythm.

The distinction needs observable criteria, because tough leadership and toxic leadership can both sound demanding in a meeting. Tough leadership names the risk, explains the rule, gives resources, listens to constraints, and follows through consistently. Toxic leadership humiliates, isolates, threatens, overloads, changes expectations without warning, or punishes people who surface inconvenient facts. The real difference is whether the leader strengthens control or forces self-protection.

For practitioners ready to apply this end to end, Safety Culture Diagnosis offers Andreza Araujo's practical logic for comparing perception, leadership behavior, field routines, and evidence. In toxic leadership cases, the diagnostic question is not whether people like the manager. It is whether the manager's behavior makes safe work easier or harder.

6. What controls should leaders put in place within 60 days?

Leaders should put five controls in place within 60 days: a psychosocial hazard register, a response-quality standard for complaints, a no-retaliation verification step, manager behavior criteria in performance reviews, and a monthly dashboard that joins HR and EHS signals. These controls turn toxic leadership from a subjective allegation into a managed exposure with evidence, ownership, and review rhythm.

Start with three data sources in week 1: absence, turnover, and report quality. Add worker consultation by week 2, because employees often know which leaders create pressure before formal systems do. By day 30, define thresholds for escalation, such as repeated complaints, sudden resignation clusters, unusually low near-miss detail, or overtime concentration under one manager. By day 60, review the controls with senior leadership.

The strongest control is consequence. If an organization documents harmful leadership but still rewards the leader because targets were met, the system teaches everyone the real rule. Safety is about coming home, and coming home includes returning from work with health, dignity, and enough trust to report what is wrong before harm becomes visible.

Toxic leadership controls compared with cosmetic responses

The comparison shows why toxic leadership cannot be solved by awareness campaigns alone. A useful response changes decision rights, reporting protection, workload evidence, and manager consequences, while a cosmetic response asks affected workers to be more resilient inside the same harmful system. The table gives EHS and HR five measurable signals, each with a stronger control than another memo, campaign, or informal warning.

Each month that toxic leadership is treated as a personality conflict allows psychosocial exposure to mature quietly, while safety dashboards continue to report activity that no longer reflects trust.

Conclusion

Toxic leadership is not a side issue for HR because it can damage mental health, reporting quality, risk perception, and the ability of workers to challenge unsafe work before harm occurs. The practical answer is to manage it as psychosocial risk, with evidence, controls, ownership, and consequences that reach the same governance table as other serious EHS exposures.

If your organization needs to test whether leadership behavior is strengthening or weakening safety culture, start with a psychosocial risk diagnostic and compare what people report with what the work system rewards. Andreza Araujo and ACS Global Ventures can help your leadership team turn that evidence into a safer operating rhythm at Andreza Araujo.