(Don’t) Fear the Bad Leaders! Three Influential Myths About Bad Leadership

In modern mediatised democracies, character assassination, name-calling, and scapegoating have intensified as political tools to discredit opponents by highlighting alleged flaws and incompetence. The concept of "bad leadership" emerges as a social construct, reflecting traits a community deems undesirable based on its sociopolitical norms. This demonization can provoke fear and outrage, escalating into extreme reactions such as political violence, exemplified by the 2021 Capitol riots and assassination attempts on figures like Donald Trump and Robert Fico in 2024. In polarized political contests, character assassination becomes pervasive, often drawing on social science concepts. During the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, debates on the age and mental fitness of Joe Biden and Donald Trump highlighted concerns linked to the 25th Amendment, which allows for a president's removal due to incapacity. In illiberal regimes, similar tactics are weaponized to undermine opponents. For example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's challenger, Péter Magyar, faced allegations of narcissism and psychopathy, bolstered by pro-government experts, his ex-wife, ex-girlfriend and leaked personal records, while propaganda painted opposition supporters as deluded or cult-like, deepening political marginalization. The article critically examines the demonization of leadership (Bligh et al., 2007). The study also underscores the paradox of leadership: what some perceive as toxic leadership, others may celebrate as heroic. Understanding leadership as a relational dynamic rather than a static construct, this research shifts focus from normative judgments to the mechanisms that sustain the leader-follower relationship. It posits that leadership rests on voluntary support, wherein followers perceive leaders' actions as legitimate and aligned with shared values (Grint, 2005; Kort, 2008). In democratic systems, leadership plays a crucial role, not only in mobilizing collective action but also in providing mechanisms to replace bad leaders peacefully. Drawing on insights from leadership studies and political and social psychology, this paper challenges three pervasive myths in leadership discourse. First, it critiques the leader-centric approach, which attributes the emergence of "bad leadership" solely to a leader's personal traits or behaviours (e.g. Kellerman, 2004, 2024; Lipman-Blumen, 2006). Second, it addresses the misconception that followers are passive conformists who blindly submit to authority. This assumption, rooted in early interpretations of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis and supported by studies such as Milgram's (1974) obedience experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 2007), has been increasingly challenged. Recent findings suggest that followers actively identify with shared values and leaders' visions rather than submitting passively to authority (Haslam et al., 2019; Birney et al., 2024). Third, it questions the assumption that followers of "bad leaders" inherently share their personality characteristics. While research on authoritarian personalities (Harms et al., 2018; Lewandowsky and Jankowski, 2023), dark traits (Nai and Toros, 2020), and populism attempts (Lewandowsky and Jankowski, 2023; Nai, 2022) to link leaders with their followers, emerging studies highlight that shared group identity often supersedes individual traits in explaining these dynamics.