Toxic leadership: development and validation of a measurement scale

Abstract

The objective of this work was to develop and validate a toxic leadership scale. To that end, toxic leadership was adopted as a conceptual basis, discussing its concepts and investigating previous measurement efforts. As a methodological procedure, a quantitative research was carried out by means of a quantitative survey (survey) and treated using statistical techniques of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, with structural equation modeling. Thus, at first, an effort was made to join and compare three previously developed scales: Schmidt (2008), Celebi, Güner and Yildiz (2015) and Yavas (2016). The initial model was translated and reviewed by a jury of experts. As a result, we obtained a model with 38 assertives distributed in three constructs that were validated by the indices of adequacy of the models of the techniques employed and, therefore, capable of evaluating the toxicity of leaders and their influence on the behavior of leaders.