Strategic bullying as a supplementary, balanced perspective on destructive leadership

The concept of destructive leadership has generated considerable interest and research by a number of scholars under rubrics such as “abusive supervision” and “incivility,” and certainly represents an appropriate forum for this special issue. In the present article, we examine the leader as a bully, and explore potential consequences of strategic leader bullying behavior through the development of a conceptual model. Building upon recent work by Salin [Salin, D. (2003). Bullying and organizational politics in competitive and rapidly changing work environments. International Journal of Management and Decision Making, 4, 35–46], leader bullying behavior is construed as a form of organizational politics. We explore the implications of bullying as an influence behavior that is employed strategically to convey particular images and exercise influence in specific situations, potentially producing positive outcomes. Finally, the implications of this conceptualization and directions for future research in this relatively new area of scientific inquiry are discussed.