Why harmful leaders are promoted? A multilevel theory of promotion decisions

Abstract

Why do organizations promote leaders whose conduct harms employees? Existing explanations identify destructive dispositions, enabling environments, and political skill, but leave open how evidence of harm enters specific advancement decisions. This article develops a conceptual model of the promotion decision as the point at which those influences converge. Four mechanisms explain why harmful conduct may fail to prevent advancement: performance systems assign limited weight to behavioral costs; political influence restricts the visibility or credibility of adverse information; powerful sponsors value coercive conduct for particular assignments; and evaluators attribute successful outcomes to harmful methods. The model distinguishes advancement under incomplete information from advancement despite acknowledged harm, and tolerated harm from conduct perceived as instrumentally useful. Six propositions specify how these mechanisms depend on information access, evaluative discretion, sponsor accountability, and causal ambiguity. Their interaction yields a central prediction: improving the visibility of harm will have limited effects when evaluators discount that harm or benefit from the conduct producing it. Promotion may subsequently reproduce these conditions by altering decision authority and employees’ expectations about reporting. The article identifies research designs capable of separating the mechanisms and explains why interventions must address both the information available to promotion decision makers and the consequences attached to that information.

Keywords: destructive leadership; toxic leadership; promotion; political skill; organizational attention; sponsorship

Introduction

Destructive leadership creates an organizational selection problem as well as a problem of employee treatment. Research documents associations between destructive leadership and adverse employee and organizational outcomes (Mackey et al., 2021; Tepper et al., 2017). Yet those consequences do not automatically become disadvantages in a leader’s career. An employee may experience a manager’s conduct daily while the executive deciding that manager’s promotion sees only a quarterly performance summary. Even when both parties recognize the same behavior, they may attach different consequences to it. Explaining promotion therefore requires an account of how organizations turn evidence about conduct into decisions about authority.

The relevant question is conditional: under what circumstances does harmful leadership carry a smaller promotion penalty, no penalty, or even a perceived advantage? This formulation avoids assuming that destructive leaders generally outperform others in promotion contests. It also separates the visibility of prominent harmful leaders from the probability that a harmful leader advances. A recent meta-analysis of Machiavellian leadership reports substantial undesirable correlates alongside conditional career success, rather than a general pattern of reward or punishment (Marbut et al., 2025). A theory of advancement should explain that variation.

Several literatures offer parts of the explanation. The toxic triangle locates destructive leadership in interactions among leaders, followers, and environments (Padilla et al., 2007). The toxic career model connects dark personality, political skill, performance ratings, and hierarchical position (Kholin et al., 2020; Templer, 2018). Research on moral judgment shows that employee performance can influence how supervisors evaluate misconduct and incorporate those judgments into promotability recommendations (Campbell et al., 2023). These accounts direct attention to enabling conditions, social influence, and evaluative bias. Their integration requires specifying where those influences meet and when they produce different outcomes.

This article locates that intersection in the promotion decision. It proposes that harmful conduct fails to constrain advancement through four mechanisms: the discounting of behavioral costs, the filtering of adverse information, the instrumental sponsorship of coercive conduct, and the attribution of success to harmful methods. The first concerns what evaluators count; the second concerns what they know and believe; the third concerns what influential beneficiaries want; and the fourth concerns how they explain results. These distinctions permit different explanations of otherwise similar promotion outcomes.

The intended contribution is a set of discriminating predictions about promotion under harm. In particular, information improvements should be more effective when decision makers regard harmful conduct as disqualifying than when they knowingly tolerate or value it. Conversely, strengthening conduct standards should have limited effects if credible evidence never reaches those who apply the standards. The model thus connects leader behavior to advancement through identifiable decision processes and specifies when familiar interventions should have different effects.

Conceptual scope and theoretical approach

Harmful conduct and leader characteristics

For this model, harmful leadership means a sustained pattern of voluntarily enacted conduct, within a leadership relationship, that abuses, deceives, exploits, or retaliates against organizational members. Examples include recurrent humiliation, deliberate misrepresentation of employees’ contributions, and retaliation for raising concerns. This behavioral scope draws on the broader destructive-leadership domain while focusing on active interpersonal conduct relevant to promotion decisions (Krasikova et al., 2013). “Toxic leader” is used only as shorthand for a leader exhibiting such a pattern, not as a diagnosis or an immutable category of person.

The distinction between destructive conduct and incompetence matters because unsuccessful leadership does not establish mistreatment. Recent conceptual work specifically emphasizes separating toxic and incompetent leadership (Ducheyne & De Fruyt, 2026). The present model likewise does not classify missed targets, unpopular decisions, demanding standards, or respectful corrective feedback as abuse. A restructuring may impose losses without involving humiliation or deception. Competence and harmful conduct can coexist, but neither is inferred from the other.

The definition concerns enacted behavior rather than a demonstrated desire to injure. Establishing a leader’s ultimate motive is often difficult, and a manager may justify knowingly coercive conduct as serving an organizational objective. Researchers should record the behavior, its context, and evidence about intent separately. They should also distinguish reports of conduct from its consequences: distress and turnover warrant attention but cannot by themselves identify who caused them or whether abuse occurred. Abusive supervision, with its focus on subordinate perceptions of sustained hostile treatment, is an important empirical domain within this scope rather than a synonym for every form of harmful leadership (Tepper et al., 2017).

Personality is an antecedent candidate, not the operational definition of the phenomenon. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy overlap but remain distinct constructs (Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Low honesty–humility, a central variable in toxic career research, should likewise not be treated as a direct measure of abusive conduct. The model allows dispositional and situational routes into harmful behavior, and allows politically skilled people to use their skills constructively. Its predictions concern the processing of evidence about conduct, conditional on that conduct occurring.

The outcome and unit of analysis

Promotion is an organizational decision that increases a person’s formal hierarchical rank or sustained decision authority. It differs from informal leader emergence, a favorable performance rating, retention, a temporary assignment, and salary growth without an increase in authority. These outcomes can be connected, but evidence about one does not directly establish another. Grijalva et al. (2015), for example, distinguish narcissism’s positive relationship with leader emergence from its nonsignificant linear relationship with observer-rated effectiveness; they also identify nonlinear patterns. Those findings neither measure the general promotion probability of abusive managers nor establish that harmful behavior causes career success.

The focal unit is a candidate’s consideration in a particular promotion cycle. Leaders and employees provide information; supervisors, sponsors, and committees evaluate it; organizational rules govern its use. The decision may involve one dominant executive or several actors with unequal influence. Culture is not treated as a single actor that selects leaders. Instead, shared expectations and formal arrangements matter through identifiable practices, such as who can nominate candidates, which reports enter deliberation, and who can override a conduct objection.

The model applies primarily to discretionary promotion in established hierarchies where some evidence of the candidate’s prior leadership is potentially available. It applies less directly to founders who obtain authority through ownership, elected office, automatic seniority progression, or external appointments with no comparable record. Those settings may exhibit related mechanisms but require different accounts of access to authority. Candidate eligibility, available vacancies, and the quality of competing candidates remain necessary features of any promotion analysis.

Approach to theory development

This is a conceptual synthesis rather than a systematic review or an empirical test. It draws selectively on destructive leadership, toxic career research, organizational attention, employee voice, moral judgment, and leadership attribution. Sources are used to establish construct boundaries and plausible mechanisms; their findings are not pooled into an estimate of the prevalence or causes of harmful leaders’ promotion. The propositions below extend that literature and should be evaluated as theoretical claims.

Organizational attention provides a useful connecting perspective. Ocasio (1997) explains how organizational arrangements distribute decision makers’ attention among issues and possible responses. Applied here, promotion procedures organize attention to the candidate’s results, conduct, and anticipated usefulness. That application explains why evidence of harm can be available somewhere in an organization without influencing a promotion decision. It also requires examining incentives: information can enter attention and still receive little decision weight.

Four mechanisms linking harmful conduct to promotion

The four mechanisms are analytically distinct rather than mutually exclusive types of organization. A candidate can benefit from several in the same decision. Their observable implications differ because they operate on different features of evaluation: the weight assigned to harm, the information accepted about it, the sponsor’s demand for a behavior, and the attribution of performance to that behavior. Table 1 summarizes the distinctions.

Discounting the costs of harmful conduct

Promotion systems often combine several criteria. A harmful leader need not receive favorable evaluations on every dimension to advance; favorable results can compensate for adverse conduct assessments if the latter carry little weight. The relevant theoretical variable is therefore the penalty attached to credible evidence of harm, conditional on the candidate’s results. A system can condemn mistreatment rhetorically while treating it as a minor deficiency in actual deliberation.

Time horizons and organizational boundaries help explain that discrepancy. A business unit’s output may be credited to its manager before employee departures, replacement costs, or coordination failures become visible. Costs may also fall outside the unit whose performance is assessed. Under these conditions, the decision record can give a distorted account of the candidate’s contribution even if each included measure is accurate. The proposed mechanism concerns the timing and allocation of attention, rather than an assumption that financial performance and employee well-being always conflict.

Campbell et al. (2023) provide a particularly relevant empirical foundation. Across a field study and experiments, they examine leniency toward higher-performing employees’ unethical conduct and how supervisors’ bottom-line mentality shapes the translation of punitive judgments into promotability considerations. This evidence concerns employee misconduct and recommendations; extending it to repeated leadership abuse and realized promotion remains a theoretical step. It nevertheless shows why recognition of misconduct and its career consequences should be treated separately.

The distinction yields a counterfactual. Consider two candidates with equivalent results, qualifications, and corroborated conduct records. In one organization, behavioral concerns can be offset by output; in the other, sufficiently serious conduct findings prevent promotion regardless of output. Harm should impose a larger disadvantage in the second. This prediction does not require either organization to have a uniformly “toxic” or “healthy” culture. It concerns the effective decision rule, including exceptions and overrides.

Proposition 1. Holding candidate results and the credibility of conduct evidence constant, harmful leadership will carry a smaller promotion penalty when evaluators can compensate for adverse conduct assessments with favorable output assessments than when conduct requirements operate as binding eligibility conditions.

The proposition is limited by conduct severity and evaluator discretion. Where an independent authority enforces a disqualification, local preferences may have little effect. Where allegations remain ambiguous, the principal mechanism may instead concern credibility. Researchers must therefore measure the rule actually applied and the discretion retained by decision makers, rather than infer both from an organization’s stated values.

Filtering the visibility and credibility of harm

A second route operates before evidence receives formal weight. Employees, peers, and senior managers observe different interactions. A candidate may communicate selectively, cultivate supportive relationships, or explain complaints in ways that undermine their credibility. The resulting discrepancy between treatment experienced below and reputation held above can protect advancement even when senior evaluators would penalize harm if persuaded that it occurred.

Toxic career research supports part of this reasoning. Templer (2018) links low honesty–humility to favorable performance ratings through political-skill assessments. Kholin et al. (2020) extend the model to hierarchical position using 203 target–peer–supervisor triplets. These studies motivate attention to social reputation, but ratings and hierarchical position do not establish the causal effect of concealing abuse on subsequent promotion. Political skill may also improve actual work performance, which must be separated from impression management.

More directly relevant to masking, Blickle et al. (2020) report that high political skill can accompany favorable coworker career-role evaluations among individuals high in Machiavellianism. Their findings do not uniformly support the idea that such individuals avoid overt misconduct early in tenure. The implication for the present model is limited but useful: favorable reputation and harmful behavior need not move together, and apparent social competence should not be assumed to eliminate behavioral risk.

Filtering also depends on employees’ ability to communicate. Research on voice and silence identifies conditions affecting whether concerns travel upward (Morrison, 2014, 2023). The model extends that insight to promotion records: an employee can recognize mistreatment yet reasonably expect speaking up to be ineffective or personally costly. Silence therefore cannot be interpreted as approval, and employees who remain under a harmful manager should not automatically be characterized as willing accomplices.

Proposition 2. Among candidates with comparable harmful conduct and work results, political skill will be more positively associated with promotion when candidates have greater control over evaluators’ access to conduct evidence; this conditional association will be mediated by lower perceived harm or lower credibility assigned to adverse reports.

This proposition treats political skill as a condition shaping the relationship between conduct and evaluation. It does not assume that dark traits cause skill acquisition. Its distinctive prediction is attenuation: the reputation-based advantage should diminish when evaluators receive independent, corroborated accounts and cannot rely exclusively on candidate-selected informants. If political skill remains beneficial after those changes because it produces better collaboration or results, that residual relationship supports a competence explanation rather than concealment.

Sponsoring conduct for its anticipated utility

Promotion can also occur despite accurate recognition of harm. A senior sponsor may believe that intimidation, suppression of dissent, or coercive pressure will help accomplish a particular objective. The candidate’s anticipated usefulness can then outweigh an acknowledged conduct cost. Ferris et al. (2007) develop a conceptual account of strategic bullying as influence behavior. That work motivates the possibility of instrumental use; it does not establish how frequently sponsors promote abusive leaders for this reason.

Instrumental sponsorship requires more than assigning a difficult task to an unpleasant manager. The distinctive claim is that the sponsor expects the harmful method itself to facilitate a desired outcome and acts on that expectation. A leader selected for technical expertise, while abuse is reluctantly tolerated, is different from one selected because the sponsor wants employees intimidated into silence. Likewise, demanding but respectful management is outside this mechanism. Empirical work must recover what behavior the sponsor anticipated and why it mattered to the decision.

The mechanism becomes plausible when benefits and costs fall on different actors. A sponsor may receive credit for a rapid change while employees bear the immediate interpersonal costs and another unit handles subsequent departures. Promotion can reward the candidate’s willingness to perform that work or secure the authority needed to continue it. Calling the arrangement useful describes the sponsor’s belief; it does not establish a positive net effect for the organization or a lack of less harmful alternatives.

The proposed relationship should weaken when the sponsor cannot externalize the consequences. If an independent review makes the sponsor answerable for the candidate’s conduct and downstream losses, the expected benefit of protection falls. The same leader could consequently be promoted under one sponsor and denied advancement under another without any change in personality. Sponsor replacement and changes in accountability are therefore theoretically informative events.

Proposition 3. Holding known harmful conduct, candidate results, and qualifications constant, perceived utility of the harmful method for a sponsor’s objective will increase sponsorship and promotion support more strongly when the sponsor is insulated from the method’s adverse consequences than when the sponsor is accountable for them.

The proposition concerns support that can influence the actual decision. A sponsor may favor the candidate but lack the authority to secure promotion. This distinction prevents a theory of individual preference from being mistaken for a theory of organizational outcomes. Evidence should trace both the sponsor’s intervention and its influence over the selection process.

Attributing success to harmful methods

A fourth mechanism changes the interpretation of conduct. Evaluators may observe a successful project and infer that the leader’s harsh methods were necessary to achieve it. Leadership-attribution research shows that explanations centered on leaders can alter evaluations of organizational performance (Meindl & Ehrlich, 1987). The proposed extension concerns the attribution of success to a specific harmful method rather than to leadership in general.

That inference is especially vulnerable when several causes of success are bundled together. A manager may possess technical insight, inherit favorable conditions, and supervise a highly capable team while also humiliating employees. Observing success under that manager cannot distinguish success caused by humiliation from success achieved despite it. Attributing outcomes to the entire leadership style grants the harmful component causal credit without isolating its contribution.

This mechanism differs from knowingly trading employee welfare for output. Under cost discounting, evaluators can regard abuse as wrong but insufficiently important to block promotion. Under attribution, they reinterpret the behavior as a necessary part of competent execution. It also differs from instrumental sponsorship: the latter concerns anticipated usefulness for a sponsor’s objective, whereas attribution concerns the retrospective causal explanation used to justify a candidate’s record. One can encourage the other, but neither logically requires the other.

Proposition 4. Among candidates with comparable harmful conduct and successful outcomes, stronger attribution of success to the harmful method will be associated with greater promotion support; this relationship will be weaker when evaluators receive credible evidence that comparable outcomes were attainable without that method.

The key boundary condition is causal ambiguity. Independent evidence about team contributions, preexisting trends, or comparable units should reduce the latitude to credit abuse. Mere additional performance information may have little effect if it repeats the outcome without clarifying its causes. The proposition therefore predicts differences between supplying more success metrics and supplying information that challenges the claimed necessity of harmful conduct.

Interaction and organizational reproduction

Why visibility alone may not change decisions

The mechanisms imply different responses to the same intervention. Where promotion occurs because harm is concealed, independent evidence can alter the decision. Where harm is already known and discounted, the same evidence may add little. Where an influential sponsor values intimidation, clearer evidence can even confirm that the candidate possesses the behavior being sought. This last possibility is a theoretical prediction about perverse incentives, not an established effect of reporting systems.

The model’s central interaction is between information and consequential evaluation. Evidence must be sufficiently credible to enter deliberation, and evaluators must have both a rule that penalizes the conduct and the ability to enforce it. Neither condition substitutes fully for the other. A formal standard without an information channel may remain unused; an information channel without consequences may document repeated harm while leaving advancement decisions unchanged.

Proposition 5. Increasing evaluators’ access to credible evidence of harmful conduct will reduce promotion support more strongly when conduct requirements are enforceable and sponsors are accountable than when conduct is compensable or sponsors are insulated. Where a sponsor explicitly values the harmful method, greater visibility need not reduce support.

This proposition makes the integration more than a catalogue of causes. It predicts an interaction that would be missed by treating reporting, performance criteria, and sponsorship as independent remedies. It also identifies a competing explanation: if disclosure consistently reduces advancement regardless of decision rules and sponsor incentives, then information availability may be sufficient in a wider range of settings than the present model predicts.

Promotion changes subsequent conditions

Promotion is also an allocation of power. The promoted leader may gain control over future appointments, complaint handling, or performance measures. Employees may infer from a visible decision that the conduct was tolerated, and potential candidates may revise their expectations about what advancement requires. These changes can reproduce the conditions that permitted the initial promotion. The toxic triangle identifies the importance of enabling environments; the present model specifies promotion as one possible event through which those environments are maintained (Padilla et al., 2007).

Reproduction is conditional. Employees cannot infer that abuse was rewarded unless they know something about both the conduct and the advancement decision. A newly promoted manager cannot redesign selection if authority remains elsewhere. Nor does observing an abusive manager’s promotion guarantee behavioral imitation: employees may resist, exit, or seek independent review. The feedback argument therefore requires evidence of changed expectations or practices, rather than treating every subsequent problem as confirmation of a toxic culture.

Proposition 6. Promotion of a leader whose harmful conduct is known to organizational members will be associated with greater expected tolerance of comparable conduct in subsequent promotion cycles, especially when that leader gains influence over selection or complaint processes; independent oversight will weaken this relationship.

The temporal implication is testable. Expectations should change after an observable promotion, and changes in selection or reporting practices should follow changes in the promoted leader’s authority. An association between abusive supervisors and permissive climates measured at one time cannot establish that sequence. The model also allows interruption: changes in oversight can prevent a single promotion from becoming a self-reinforcing pattern.

Research designs that distinguish the mechanisms

Observe promotion events rather than career position alone

A useful field design would follow all eligible candidates across several promotion cycles. Before decisions occur, researchers would collect behaviorally specific employee reports, independent conduct records where available, work results, qualifications, and political-skill assessments. They would then record what evidence reached evaluators, its perceived credibility, the effective weight attached to conduct, sponsor interventions, and the actual promotion outcome. Measuring these processes separately is essential to distinguish missing information from information that is knowingly disregarded.

Promotion should be analyzed against a defined risk set. Studying only successful executives excludes harmful candidates who were rejected and constructive candidates who advanced. A longitudinal design should track applications or nominations, eligibility, vacancies, and competing exits. Separate models may be needed for entry into the candidate pool and selection from that pool. Otherwise, apparent selection effects may reflect differences in willingness to seek advancement or access to nomination rather than the committee’s final choice.

Event-history or discrete-time models can estimate advancement conditional on opportunity, with candidates nested within organizational settings and repeated observations within candidates. Such models do not by themselves establish causation. Harmful leaders may inherit distressed units, highly scrutinized managers may attract more complaints, and promotion itself may change subsequent conduct. Measuring conditions before promotion, retaining nonpromoted comparators, and examining unit histories help address these alternatives. No single set of statistical controls can substitute for a defensible temporal design.

Manipulate information and incentives separately

Experiments can directly distinguish the mechanisms. One design could hold a candidate’s qualifications, work outcomes, and substantiated conduct constant while varying whether behavioral standards are compensable and whether the evaluator is accountable for downstream harm. A separate information experiment could vary independent corroboration and candidate control of informants. An attribution experiment could provide evidence that the successful outcome was attainable through a respectful alternative. Keeping these manipulations separate before combining them would help establish which judgment each changes.

The outcomes should include perceived harm, credibility, causal attribution, sponsorship, and promotion choice. A single question about whether the candidate is “a good leader” collapses the model’s mediators. Manipulation checks should also establish whether participants recognize the conduct as harmful while nevertheless supporting advancement. That response would be particularly informative because it distinguishes deliberate tolerance from failure to detect misconduct.

Experimental work should use consequentially framed decisions with experienced evaluators where feasible, while recognizing that hypothetical choices do not reproduce employment stakes. Organizational field interventions could test revised evidence packets or independent review procedures without exposing employees to additional mistreatment. Staggered implementation can support comparisons, but researchers must assess why implementation timing differs and whether treated units had different preexisting trajectories. Sensitive conduct reports require arrangements that protect participants and prevent research access from becoming a new route for retaliation.

Recover sponsor reasoning and alternative explanations

Instrumental sponsorship is the least established pathway in the integrated model and needs close process evidence. Comparative cases should reconstruct what senior decision makers knew before promotion, what behavior they expected, and how they intervened. Contemporaneous records and accounts from multiple positions can distinguish prospective demand for coercion from retrospective rationalization. A difficult assignment alone is inadequate evidence: the sponsor may have selected the candidate for expertise while opposing the abuse.

Researchers should explicitly test alternatives. These include genuine competence that exceeds the measured costs, mistaken allegations, scarce internal candidates, automatic progression, favoritism unrelated to harmful conduct, and leadership behavior that becomes harmful only after promotion. Comparisons should also assess whether reports are evaluated differently depending on the candidate’s and reporter’s status or social identity. Such differences may change the credibility mechanism, but they should be measured rather than assumed to operate uniformly across settings.

Evidence against the model is as important as evidence consistent with it. The filtering pathway would be weakened if independent information left evaluator knowledge unchanged while explaining all career effects through actual performance. The instrumental pathway would be weakened if anticipated coercion consistently reduced sponsor support even when accountability was low. The attribution pathway would be weakened if clear counterfactual evidence changed causal beliefs without changing promotion support. These findings would locate the limits of the mechanisms rather than be absorbed into a general claim that organizations reward toxicity.

Discussion

Theoretical implications

The model advances a decision-centered account of harmful leaders’ promotion. Its proposed contribution to destructive-leadership theory is to explain how conducive environments enter an identifiable allocation of authority. Performance criteria, reporting access, sponsorship, and causal interpretation become mechanisms with distinct observations and boundary conditions. This focus complements research on the production and consequences of harm by explaining when those consequences become relevant to advancement.

The model also sharpens the meaning of career success in dark-personality research. Hierarchical position and favorable ratings provide useful evidence, but neither substitutes for observing promotion decisions over time. Political skill can influence actual performance, evaluators’ impressions, and access to influential supporters. Separating those routes prevents a favorable rating from being interpreted automatically as successful deception and allows constructive uses of political skill to remain within the theory.

A further implication concerns organizational knowledge. Knowing about harm is not equivalent to acting against it. The distinction between missing, discounted, desired, and reinterpreted conduct explains why apparently similar organizations might respond differently to the same substantiated complaint. It also prevents a circular explanation in which a culture is classified as toxic because harmful leaders advance and their advancement is then explained by the culture’s toxicity. The relevant conditions must be measured independently of the promotion outcome.

These claims remain bounded. The article does not establish how common any pathway is, whether they account for most harmful leaders’ promotions, or whether its integration is exhaustive. The evidence underlying the synthesis varies in construct, design, and outcome. Further theory comparison is needed to determine the incremental explanatory value of the proposed interactions over existing accounts of attention, moral reasoning, political skill, and sponsorship. The value of the framework depends on that comparison, not on the number of literatures it brings together.

Implications for promotion governance

The practical implication is to diagnose where conduct evidence loses influence. If harmful behavior is poorly observed, organizations can broaden access to independent information and protect those providing it. If evidence is acknowledged but routinely offset by output, the relevant change concerns promotion criteria and the authority to enforce them. If sponsors benefit from coercion, review must include sponsor decisions and the allocation of downstream costs. If abuse is credited with success, evaluation should examine alternative explanations and comparable results obtained through different methods.

These are design implications of the theory, not interventions whose effectiveness has been demonstrated here. They also require careful implementation. Uncorroborated complaints should not become automatic disqualifications, and a numerical average of feedback should not substitute for examining serious patterns. Conduct assessments should be behaviorally specific, allow a fair opportunity to respond, and use decision makers capable of reviewing evidence independently. Consistency requires examining exceptions for powerful candidates as well as the formal standard.

Measurement can create new incentives. A manager assessed on complaint counts may suppress complaints; one assessed only on retention may obstruct legitimate transfers. A reporting reform may initially increase recorded concerns because access improves. Organizations should therefore interpret conduct, reporting, and workforce indicators jointly and over time. A decline in reported problems cannot be taken as success without evidence that employees can still report safely and that harmful behavior has declined.

Conclusion

Harmful conduct becomes a career constraint only through decisions that recognize it, assign it significance, and attach consequences to it. The proposed framework explains four ways that connection can fail: behavioral costs receive limited weight, adverse evidence is filtered, sponsors value coercive methods, or success is attributed to those methods. Its central claim is conditional: visibility is most likely to alter promotion when credible information is coupled with enforceable conduct standards and accountable decision makers. Studying those connections can explain both the advancement of harmful leaders and the circumstances in which organizations prevent it.

References

Blickle, G., Kückelhaus, B. P., Kranefeld, I., Schütte, N., Genau, H. A., Gansen-Ammann, D.-N., & Wihler, A. (2020). Political skill camouflages Machiavellianism: Career role performance and organizational misbehavior at short and long tenure. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 118, 103401. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103401

Campbell, E. M., Welsh, D. T., & Wang, W. (2023). Above the law? How motivated moral reasoning shapes evaluations of high performer unethicality. Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(7), 1096–1120. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001054

Ducheyne, D., & De Fruyt, F. (2026). Distinguishing destructive/toxic from incompetent leadership. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 19(3), 245–258. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2026.10070

Ferris, G. R., Zinko, R., Brouer, R. L., Buckley, M. R., & Harvey, M. G. (2007). Strategic bullying as a supplementary, balanced perspective on destructive leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 195–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.004

Grijalva, E., Harms, P. D., Newman, D. A., Gaddis, B. H., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linear and nonlinear relationships. Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12072

Kholin, M., Kückelhaus, B. P., & Blickle, G. (2020). Why dark personalities can get ahead: Extending the toxic career model. Personality and Individual Differences, 156, 109792. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109792

Krasikova, D. V., Green, S. G., & LeBreton, J. M. (2013). Destructive leadership: A theoretical review, integration, and future research agenda. Journal of Management, 39(5), 1308–1338. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206312471388

Mackey, J. D., Ellen, B. P., III, McAllister, C. P., & Alexander, K. C. (2021). The dark side of leadership: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis of destructive leadership research. Journal of Business Research, 132, 705–718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.10.037

Marbut, A. R., Harms, P. D., & Credé, M. (2025). In the service of the prince: A meta-analytic review of Machiavellian leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 46(6), 939–969. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2877

Meindl, J. R., & Ehrlich, S. B. (1987). The romance of leadership and the evaluation of organizational performance. Academy of Management Journal, 30(1), 91–109. https://doi.org/10.5465/255897

Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173–197. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091328

Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-054654

Ocasio, W. (1997). Towards an attention-based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1), 187–206. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199707)18:1+<187::AID-SMJ936>3.0.CO;2-K

Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001

Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556–563. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00505-6

Templer, K. J. (2018). Dark personality, job performance ratings, and the role of political skill: An indication of why toxic people may get ahead at work. Personality and Individual Differences, 124, 209–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.11.030

Tepper, B. J., Simon, L., & Park, H. M. (2017). Abusive supervision. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 123–152. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-041015-062539

Table 1

Mechanisms linking harmful conduct to promotion

Note. All rows describe propositions of the present framework. They are not a summary of effects established for actual promotion by the cited studies. The mechanisms can coexist within a single decision.