The other side of leadership: Dark leadership

Today, studies showing how dark leadership behaviors are perceived by employees are not at the desired level compared to other topics in organizational literature. The main purpose of this study is to; evaluate the perspectives of employees on the dark side of leadership and the dark personality traits they perceive in their leaders. In this thesis, leadership was approached from a different perspective and the dark aspects of the leader were examined through employee perception. Thus the perceptions of the employees about the dark side of leadership were evaluated and how the employees were affected by such behavior characteristics and their reactions were examined. This research was designed according to the phenomenology pattern, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The research participant consisted of individuals selected from the administrative staff of a public university. The criterion sampling and maximum diversity sampling methods, were used in this thesis to express the problem better. In this study, the interview method was preferred as the data collection method. A semi-structured interview form developed by the researcher was used and the data were analyzed by content analysis technique in this study. As a result of the analyzes made, the behavioral characteristics that make up dark leadership were grouped under two themes, behavioral characteristics and physiological characteristics. In this sense, the responses of the employees exposed to dark leadership behavior and how they were affected physiologically and psychologically were evaluated. The findings were discussed on the basis of the relevant literature, and suggestions were made for practitioners and researchers at the end of the research.