Toxic Leadership at Work: 4 Myths That Keep Psychosocial Risk Unnamed

A supervisor humiliates a worker after a production delay. The team stops raising concerns, overtime becomes normal, and the monthly safety meeting still reports full compliance. When leaders call this a personality issue, the organization loses the chance to see a work-related hazard while it is still changeable.

Toxic leadership is not automatically a clinical diagnosis, and not every demanding manager creates a psychosocial risk. The safety question is more precise. Does a leader's repeated behavior change workload, decision rights, reporting, recovery time, or the team's ability to challenge an unsafe plan? When the answer is yes, leadership has entered the occupational risk system.

This article challenges four myths that keep that risk unnamed. The practical lens is the work system, which includes behavior, consequences, controls, and the authority to correct conditions. It aligns with the work-design logic of ISO 45003:2021 and with the worker-protection principles behind ILO Convention C190, adopted in 2019.

Why toxic leadership belongs in the safety conversation

Psychosocial risk is often treated as a softer subject than physical safety because its evidence is distributed across conversations, schedules, turnover, complaints, absence, and operating decisions. That fragmentation protects the problem. A visible machine defect creates an owner and a deadline, while a leader who punishes bad news can make the evidence disappear before anyone names it.

The strongest test is not whether employees like a manager. It is whether the leadership pattern creates foreseeable exposure and removes a protective control. A supervisor who ridicules a stop-work intervention weakens reporting. A manager who rewards impossible deadlines increases fatigue pressure. An executive who asks for good news only changes the information available for risk decisions.

Andreza Araújo's work on safety culture consistently places leadership behavior beside operating conditions rather than above them. In Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice, the useful question is not whether the organization has the right values on a poster. It is whether those values survive the decisions that people make under pressure.

Myth 1: Toxic leadership is only an HR problem

This myth seems reasonable because harassment, discrimination, and abusive conduct may require an HR process. The mistake is assuming that an HR process is the whole control system. If the same leadership behavior changes staffing, overtime, escalation, fatigue, or reporting quality, EHS and operational leaders also need to understand the exposure.

Consider a maintenance team whose manager insults anyone who questions a schedule. The conduct may belong in a formal complaint channel, yet the safety consequence appears in a different place. Workers stop challenging isolations, supervisors approve work with less discussion, and the organization receives fewer signals about changing conditions.

A practical boundary keeps the response disciplined. HR should own the conduct process, while EHS and operations should map the work conditions that the behavior changes. They can ask which tasks are affected, which decisions become harder to escalate, which groups are exposed, and which control checks no longer receive credible information.

The ISO 45003 work-design tests provide a useful adjacent lens. The goal is not to turn every difficult conversation into a safety case. It is to prevent the organization from separating a leadership pattern from the conditions that make people less able to work safely.

Myth 2: A tough leader improves safety because standards rise

High standards can improve safety when they are specific, resourced, and applied consistently. Fear is not the same as accountability. A leader may produce fast compliance while weakening the quality of information that makes prevention possible.

The difference appears when a worker must choose between telling the truth and protecting their standing. If a missed target triggers public humiliation, people may hide uncertainty, delay escalation, or present a completed form as proof that the work was controlled. The standard appears higher while the evidence becomes less trustworthy.

Andreza Araújo's distinction between compliance and culture is useful here. A rule that is followed only when the leader is watching has not yet become a dependable control. Leadership quality is visible when the manager receives inconvenient information, asks what made the deviation likely, and changes the condition that produced it without lowering the required standard.

Leaders can test this myth by reviewing one recent bad-news event. Who spoke first? What happened to the person who raised the concern? Which work-design condition was corrected? If the review ends with retraining or a warning to be more careful, the organization has measured obedience instead of control reliability.

Myth 3: Resilient employees can absorb a toxic manager

Individual resilience is valuable, but it cannot substitute for a safe work design. When an organization tells employees to cope with intimidation, unpredictable priorities, or chronic availability demands, it moves responsibility from the hazard creator to the exposed worker.

This myth also distorts selection. The people who remain may look adaptable because they are willing to work through exhaustion or keep silent about conflict. Meanwhile, workers who protect recovery time, question unsafe trade-offs, or ask for support are labeled as insufficiently committed. The organization then mistakes self-suppression for resilience.

The corrective action is structural. Review staffing, shift patterns, handover quality, workload peaks, decision authority, and recovery expectations alongside the leader's conduct. A manager cannot be expected to solve a workload problem with motivation, just as a worker cannot solve an authority problem with personal toughness.

The psychosocial exposure review helps move this discussion from personality to conditions. Andreza Araújo's leadership perspective adds an important boundary. A strong leader can ask for demanding performance while still making it possible for people to report risk, recover between demands, and disagree with a plan that has become unsafe.

Myth 4: If nobody files a complaint, there is no psychosocial risk

Formal complaints are important evidence, but they are not a complete detection system. A team may stay silent because the reporting channel is not trusted, the manager controls access to overtime or promotion, previous complaints produced retaliation, or workers do not have language for the condition they are experiencing.

Silence can therefore be a result of exposure rather than evidence that exposure is absent. The organization needs several routes that do not depend on a single brave person. These routes can include confidential reporting, structured one-to-one conversations, worker-representative input, workload review, absence-pattern review, and direct observation of how leaders respond to technical disagreement.

Managers should also examine the quality of the response after a concern is raised. A channel that accepts complaints but does not show ownership, protection, and follow-through will gradually lose credibility. The relevant measure is not the number of reports alone. It is whether concerns become visible, are assessed fairly, and lead to a change that workers can recognize.

The questions that expose organizational silence can support this review without turning psychological safety into unrestricted agreement. A healthy safety culture makes dissent usable. It still expects evidence, discipline, and respect for critical controls.

What leaders should do when the pattern is credible

Start with a defined leadership pattern rather than a label. Record the repeated behavior, the operating condition it changes, the people exposed, and the decision that becomes harder to make. This keeps the conversation evidence-based and protects the process from becoming a personality contest.

Then assign two owners. One owner should manage the conduct and employee-protection response. The other should manage the work-system response, including workload, escalation, reporting, staffing, and control verification. If one owner is expected to do both without authority or support, the intervention will likely become another document that signals concern without changing work.

Finally, return to the affected team and test whether the control changed. Can people raise a concern without predictable punishment? Has the schedule become workable? Does the supervisor now receive and act on bad news? Has decision authority moved closer to the person who can stop or redesign the work? Those answers are stronger evidence than a completed awareness campaign.

Andreza Araújo's approach is practical because it treats culture as an operating property. Across her safety leadership writing, the central challenge is to connect what leaders say with what the system rewards, records, and corrects. That connection is where psychosocial risk becomes governable.

Conclusion: name the pattern before it becomes the norm

Toxic leadership becomes a safety issue when repeated behavior changes work conditions, weakens reporting, increases exposure, or removes the team's ability to challenge risk. Calling it only an HR matter, a high-standard style, a resilience test, or a complaint problem leaves the control system incomplete.

Leaders do not need a perfect label before acting. They need a specific pattern, a protected route for evidence, an owner with authority, and a follow-up check that workers can feel in the work. That is how the organization prevents silence from becoming part of the operating model.

For more practical guidance on safety culture, leadership, and work design, explore Andreza Araújo's books and resources at andrezaaraujo.com.

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