The relationship between perceived toxic leadership and work engagement

White-collar employees working in the textile industry work in a dynamic, intense and stressful environment that requires effort to present the most accurate and completed work outputs to their internal stakeholders, teams and company. The workload and pressure in this stressful environment require a positive and open-minded leadership style that can motivate and guide textile workers. Based on the stated assumption, the relationship between toxic leadership and work engagement was examined in this study. As a result of the research; it is expected that the toxic leadership behaviors of managers will negatively affect the work engagement of white-collar employees working in the textile industry. Based on this purpose, some hypotheses were developed to investigate the relationship, and data were obtained from 201 white-collar individuals working in the textile sector through an online survey. In order to collect data, the toxic leadership scale and work engagement scale were used together with demographic questions. All data analyzes were performed using the statistical program SPSS. As a result of the analysis of the data, it has been determined that toxic leadership is a type of leadership that negatively affects the work engagement levels of white-collar workers in the textile industry. Since the research was conducted specifically for the textile industry and white-collar workers, it contributes to the literature and is important.